Just a Bystander

Chapter 35: A Plea

By now the sun had dipped far below the horizon, transforming the Academy grounds into a forest of dark shapes. The globe lights provided enough illumination along the paths, but beyond that the darkness claimed everything else. Off in the distance, half-hidden behind the shapes of trees, little islands of light marked out some of the other buildings in the grounds. I was reminded of my night after the lake incident. Night had a way of offering a new perspective of things, and now that I wasn't half-delirious from overdraw I could appreciate how different the Academy looked under the faint light of a crescent moon. It occurred to me for the first time how massive the grounds really were, considering that there were only around 400 students. 

The Demiurge set off down the path, leaving me to trail behind him. His course was unmistakable we were headed to the Spire. At thirty stories, it was already a rather intimidating structure in daylight given how it dwarfed the other buildings in the Academy. Now, the cover of night transformed it into something else, something that seemed to sense my gaze upon it and that was scrutinizing me in return. The base of it was well-lit with globe lights, but its upper reaches were shrouded in shadow, accentuating the feeling that perhaps there was an intelligence hidden there in the yawning void etched against the velvety backdrop of the night sky, balefully watching, watching...

I couldn't help but shudder a little as I looked at it now. It was like I was only really seeing it for the first time.

The Demiurge glanced back at me and caught the look on my face. "Yes, it's quite a sight, isn't it?" he said quietly.

"What's inside it, sir?"

"My office, among other things." Even with his back turned, I could hear the smile in his voice. The cavalier tone was very out-of-place in the gloom of this chilly early-winter night, and doubly so as we drew closer to the shape of the Spire blotting out the stars. I was dissatisfied with his non-answer, but it seemed unwise to press the issue. I would soon be inside, after all, where I could see for myself what exactly lay within the enigmatic Spire.

The walk seemed to take much longer than I expected. Was it me, or had time and the distance stretched somehow, elongating the minutes and metres? I remember having to pass the Spire on the way to other parts of the campus since it stood roughly in the centre of the grounds, and in my memory those walks had been brief, fleeting moments. 

In fact, there seemed to be more of the grounds themselves. I had only been on this particular path on two occasions, so perhaps that could be explained by some unfamiliarity with the route. And yet... and yet it wasn't totally unfamiliar. There were portions of it I could recall walking past, but these familiar portions now seemed further apart. 

The Demiurge glanced back at me again, but said nothing. I thought I caught a look of interest or curiosity, but he was probably going to give another non-answer if I asked something, so I occupied myself by paying closer attention to my surroundings. There was a growing certainty that I was seeing, for the first time, forks in the path that led to other parts of the campus I hadn't yet visited, even though I had been down this way before. What was even more disquieting was the fact that I wasn't sure if I had ever seen those buildings before.

We did eventually find ourselves at the entrance to the Spire. The Demiurge hopped lightly up the short flight of steps leading to the heavy wooden double doors and they swung open silently before him, revealing nothing but utter darkness. I paused at the bottom of the steps.

"What's the matter?" The Demiurge looked down at me, his face a picture of concern. 

Was that even a serious question? I stared helplessly at him and gestured at the emptiness beyond the open doors. "Sir... that's more than a little scary."

"Oh." He cheerfully stuck an arm into the darkness. "Yes, I'd forgotten what it must look like. But not to worry, it's a simple sequence that allows a measure of discretion and privacy, not some portal into a cosmic void. There's a perfectly ordinary room beyond it."

And with that, he walked right through and vanished. I was left alone, the Spire towering over me, with its maw wide open and waiting for me to enter.

"Nothing ventured, nothing gained," I muttered to myself, and followed after the Demiurge.

As I passed over the threshold, I felt a great arcanic pressure sweep over me. Even more alarming was the fact that I didn't just feel it on myself I could also feel it through the phantom limb that was my connection to the orb, and the orb itself. It was gone as soon as I was through the door, but I was left with the vivid impression of having been briefly scrutinised and judged. 

The Demiurge had been true to his word. By the welcome glow of a globe light tuned to a warmer colour, I saw that we were in a small antechamber with a floor of black marble that bore a striking similarity to the material in the duelling chambers. I could see tiny lines of glyphs skittering beneath the surface like frozen lightning, not quite as structured as the lattice in the duelling chamber, but still communicating some sense of organic order. And where the duelling chambers' glyphs were silver, these were gold.

I saw an elevator and a set of doors that led deeper into the Spire, but the Demiurge set off through a small archway off to the side and led up a set of stairs that hugged the curved wall. Given the scale of the Spire, it was a comparatively narrow passage, only just wide enough for two people at a time.

"Think you've got a good set of lungs?" he called back.

"What?"

"It's a tall Spire, after all."

I paled. "We're walking up the entire way? Why not take the elevator?"

A short burst of laughter from him echoed off the walls. "Don't worry, we're not taking the stairs. The elevator below goes up to the normal areas. We're going somewhere a little more exclusive, so we're taking a different elevator," he said as we finally got to a landing. By my estimation, we had climbed more than two stories. 

The stairs opened up into a smaller mirror of the antechamber, where another set of doors led off deeper into the Spire. The wall of the room closer to the centre of the Spire had an elevator door set into it, and this one had a set of glyphs etched on its surface. I recognised some of them from the Advanced Set; enough to understand it formed a barrier of sorts. 

 "In we go," the Demiurge said, stepping up to the elevator which opened to admit him. He held the door open and I followed, feeling nervous. 

The doors slid quietly shut, and we started our ascent even though I didn't see him make use of any Minor Control Sphere. Most elevator Control Spheres would have some indication of the level, so without it, I had no idea how fast we were going. But I barely had time to think about that before the doors opened. Had we really ascended to the top in a manner of seconds? Without feeling it? I wondered how different the sequences in the Spire's elevator were compared with the conventional ones.

The elevator opened out into a transitional space and I saw a set of steps next to it leading back down, but none going up. The Demiurge walked right up to a set of ornate double-doors, with what looked like actual fist-sized diamonds set into the handles. This time, he grasped them and concentrated for a moment. I heard a series of locks click, and when he released the handles they pushed themselves downwards and allowed the door to swing open of its own accord.

I let out a gasp.

It wasn't the size of the chamber, although that certainly added to the effect since it seemed to take up the entire circumference of the Spire. The walls tapered up to end in a pyramidic flourish, and I could see that the apex was made of glass that allowed some of the moonlight to filter in. I estimated that the chamber was about 5 stories, though it was hard to tell without any point of reference. More globe lights clung to the walls or floated freely, twirling in slow arcs through the air.

But those things only registered peripherally in my mind. It was a massive construct that dominated the space that took my breath away a dodecahedron; twelve pentagons that fitted together into a three-dimensional shape. The edges seemed to be made of some metallic material that shifted from black to silver to gold and back again, while the dodecahedron itself was composed of a cloudy-white crystal. And although it looked perfectly solid, the surface of the crystal seemed to shift ever-so-slightly, like a viscous liquid trapped between two planes of glass. This strange shape floated in mid-air, fixed at the very centre of the chamber, although it spun freely in place without any discernible pattern. 

"Here we are," the Demiurge said as he moved to stand directly beneath it and gestured with a flourish. 

I took a few tentative steps into the chamber, staring around. Here, the lightning-spread of glyphs in the floor congregated directly beneath the crystal, and there they formed a perfect circle that encompassed the construct within its circumference, leaving the centre completely bare a mirror of polished black marble that perfectly reflected the Demiurge and the dodecahedron floating above him. 

"What... what is this?" I whispered.

A wave of arcana crashed into me, bringing me to my knees. I felt my auric-ambient-flare being squeezed, pressed, and I could feel my link to the orb being twisted like an actual arm. A cry of pain left my lips. I felt the orb twitch in my bag, felt something like a heartbeat going wild before it stuttered out. 

'This is a knot-link-anchor for the woven-shackled-stream.' It was the white-bright-power that was now touching-speaking-bending me, with a force of will that was so radiant that my eyes started tearing as I looked at him through this strange new sense. 

"Stop," I gasped out, one hand clutching my head. The orb in my bag twitched again, and I found myself instinctively reaching for it with my free hand. I rummaged through my bag, felt my desperate fingers close around it, and held it close to me, though I had no idea why it felt like that would help at all. It was as instinctive as pressing a hand to a wound or cradling an injured limb.

'This is the will-curse-test of arcanophany.' The white-bright-power did not speak aloud, but it thundered in my mind all the same. 'You must feel-hear-know it yourself.' 

Even through the haze of pain, I could tell that the Demiurge wasn't throwing the full scope of his reality behind this ensorcellment. I understood everything he was communicating with me, but that came with an underlying sense of restraint. This was not the brute-force ensorcellment I had performed on my father to give him my understanding of what it was like to be bound by the prophetic links of a major Prophecy. This was surgery he was moulding his knowledge to fit my own paradigm of the world, using impressions I could comprehend.  

"Stop," I gasped again, twisting in pain as the orb twitched in my hands once more. "It's... too much!"

'This is a piece of the puzzle to your desire to know what overdrawing is. Solve it, and one day you may not need the unnatural-changed-defiant construct. And if that day comes, unchosen-sighted-{~?~}, then I may yet see you here again.'

Whatever that last concept was, it really was too much, even filtered through the Demiurge's expert mind. The wash of arcanic power flowing over, around, and through me was burying my consciousness, and the pain in what felt like my auric-ambient-flare itself was beyond sensation and comprehension. My vision was fading. I saw the Demiurge's shoes coming closer and felt myself being carried up.

Before I lost consciousness, I felt-heard-knew something else a different voice, one that I recognised had reached out to me before as I lay in the infirmary over a week ago.

'Touch-speak-bend the Chosen-Blinded-Jailer,' the knot-link-anchor of the woven-shackled-stream whispered to me again. 'Free him. Aid us.'