Sael stepped outside and looked up.
The sky was clear, which was convenient. A few clouds drifted south over the rooftops of the merchant quarter, but the upper atmosphere, as far as he could see, was open. He'd need to go well past that, of course, but it was nice when the first leg of a trip had good weather.
He stretched his neck to one side, then the other, and started walking toward the garden gate, where the lane opened up and there was enough clearance from the rooftops that he wouldn't clip anything on the way up. Behind him, the front door opened again and Lance came out in a hurry, still pulling one arm through the sleeve of his coat.
"Sir."
Sael turned around.
"You're going now?" Lance said. "Right now?"
"The sky is clear."
Lance had his coat half-on and a look on his face that Sael couldn't read.
"Are you truly going to fly into outer space, sir?" Lance asked.
Sael studied him for a moment, trying to work out what part of this was generating confusion. Not finding any, he decided to simply answer.
"Yes," he said. "We discussed this just now. I said I would go up past the atmosphere, drink the flask, and attempt the meditation. Was that unclear?"
"No, sir. The words were all clear."
"Then I'm not sure what the issue is."
Lance pressed his lips together and said nothing more, which seemed to mean the end of the conversation, but the expression underneath it was still doing something Sael couldn't parse. He considered the possibilities. Lance wasn't angry; the jaw was wrong for that. He wasn't sick again; his color was fine. He wasn't frightened, exactly, though there was something adjacent to it in the way he kept glancing upward.
Then it occurred to him.
"Would you like something from up there?" Sael asked.
Lance's expression changed. "What?"
"Since I'm going," Sael said. "If there's something you'd like. I'll be near the moon for a while, so a piece of it would be simple enough. Or a meteor fragment, if I pass one. I don't know what's available, but I can look."
Lance seemed confused at first, and then, in a voice that had given up on something: "A piece of moon would be nice, sir."
"Alright," Sael said. "I'll see what I can find."
He gave Lance a nod and turned back toward the gate, satisfied that the matter was now actually settled.
"You should stop doing that," Oz said from the garden wall.
Sael paused. "Doing what?"
"Telling people you're going to do things that would shatter their understanding of the world, and then being confused when they react."
"I wasn't confused," Sael said. "He wanted a moon rock."
"He did not want a moon rock. He was trying to process the fact that you are about to leave the planet. You saw that on his face, failed to identify it, and decided he must want a souvenir."
Sael looked at Oz for a moment, then turned back toward Lance.
"Lance."
"Sir?"
"Was Oz right just now? About what your face was doing."
Lance hesitated, which in Sael's experience was how people said yes when they didn't want to say it out loud. "I... yes, sir. That's more or less what was happening."
"Hmm."
A realization, this hmm.
"So you don't need the moon rock, then."
"I would still very much like the moon rock, sir."
"Alright," Sael said, for the second time, and turned toward the gate.
Behind him, he heard Oz make a short nasal sound as he stopped at the end of the garden path and looked up.
The moon sat low over the eastern hills, three-quarters full. Sael had looked at it thousands of times across hundreds of years and had never once considered visiting. He wasn't going to visit it tonight, either, but it made a decent landmark.
He cast [Teleportation], and the world folded and opened forty miles above where he'd been standing, and Sael was in the sky.
The city was a small bright patch below him, already too far away to make out individual buildings. The air was thinner here, colder, and the wind pulled at his robes. The moon was larger, as the horizon had started to curve.
He cast [Teleportation] again.
Another fold. The air thinned to almost nothing and the cold deepened into a silence that pressed against his ears. Orlys was a faint cluster of light on a dark surface that was beginning to look more like a shape than a place. He could see the coastline, and the ocean beyond it, reflecting starlight in a long, broken line.
Again, and the atmosphere gave way. The blue bled out of the sky in stages, thinning to a pale nothing, and then it was gone and the sky was black and the world beneath him was a sphere.
He kept going.
Fold. Open. The planet shrank. He could hold it between his thumb and forefinger if he held his hand up. The sun was behind it, painting a thin crescent of light along one edge, and the rest was in shadow, and the cities he'd walked through and the people he'd spoken to that evening were somewhere on a surface too small to see.
One more fold brought him far enough that the planet was a marble. The moon hung off to his left, close enough to see the texture of its surface, grey, cratered and still. The silence around him was so total that the only sound left was the beat of his own heart and the faint, steady hum of his core working beneath it.
Sael floated there for a while and looked at everything. There was quite a lot of it, and none of it was in a hurry.
He reached into his coat and pulled out the clay flask.
The cold had nearly solidified it. The wax seal cracked clean enough, but what came out when he tipped it was closer to paste than liquid, sluggish and thick. He had to wait between each mouthful for the next one to slide down. It tasted the way old medicine tasted, bitter and heavy, with a warmth that started in his throat and kept spreading long after he swallowed.
He finished it, checked the flask was empty, and put it away.
Then he closed his eyes.
He wasn't breathing, as there was nothing to breathe up here, and his body didn't require it. His constitution was high enough that the vacuum was uncomfortable rather than lethal; he could hold his breath for centuries if it came to that. Probably.
The flask was working, too. Which, to be honest, impressed Sael in a way he hardly could put into words. He could feel it behind his sternum, spreading outward in slow pulses, and wherever it reached, the edges of his thoughts went soft. His awareness, usually precise and structured, began to lose its borders. The hum of his core grew louder as everything else quieted.
Lance's instructions came back to him: Let go of yourself. Let your mind empty. Let your consciousness go with it.
Sael turned inward and looked at what he'd been carrying.
He'd been holding it for so long. Constant regulation, every second of every day, waking or otherwise, for decades. It had become so automatic that noticing it was like trying to notice your own breathing; the moment you did, you couldn't understand how you'd ever ignored it. His core sat at the center of everything he was, and the grip he kept on it was the only thing between its current state and what would happen without him.
So he let go.
His body knew what had happened before his mind caught up. Every muscle locked at once, his spine went rigid, and the mana that had been sitting inside him since before most modern kingdoms on that marble below had names came out, and it came out hard.
The mana shockwave from the sudden release bent the light around him and kept traveling, crossing the distance to the moon in seconds, and surface dust on craters while his heart was going so fast he could feel it in his teeth, in his fingertips, behind his eyes, and he understood with clarity that this was what his body had been afraid of for decades. This. The reason it had stopped letting him fall unconscious all those years ago, because it knew, deeper than thought, what would come loose if he ever stopped holding on.
Another wave tore out of him, wider this time, and warping the stars behind it as it expanded. Then more, stacking and overlapping, his core pulsing without him for the first time in his life, finding a rhythm he had never heard because he'd always been the one setting it. The space around him thickened with it, became heavy with energy that had been locked inside a single person and was remembering what it felt like to be free.
And then it settled.
His core was still pulsing and sending mana out into the void in wide, slow waves, but the violence of the first few seconds had passed. Without him directing it, and without the decades of compression, rationing and careful management, his core had found its own rhythm.
Yes, this was his natural state.
Ding!
A system notification suddenly appeared behind Sael's eyelids, and when he checked...
You have leveled up!
Behind the message, was the same message again. And behind that one, another. Sael scrolled through them and counted roughly a hundred instances of the same notification stacked on top of each other, each one generated in the seconds after he'd released his core. He dismissed them all and checked his status.
Sael of Hel — Level 6907 [Archmage] (+100)
Human (Demi-Primordial)
[Wrath Level: 0%]
[Main Title: The Struggling One]
Hmm.
He'd... gained a hundred levels from releasing his core, it made sense when he thought about it, but it somewhat bothered him a bit, as it seemed too fast even for him. Nevertheless, he dismissed the notification and went back to waiting.
The void was quiet while his core pulsed on its own and the mana drifted away from him in all directions with nowhere particular to be. Lance had told him to empty his mind. Think of nothing. Hold no thought, no awareness, no direction, and let the sixth sense find him in the absence of everything else.
Sael tried, and the problem with the instruction became obvious almost immediately, because he couldn't think of nothing. The act of trying was itself a thought, which meant you'd already failed by the time you started, which meant the instruction was either a paradox or relied on a definition of "nothing" that Lance hadn't specified well enough. The two states in which a person genuinely thought nothing were sleeping and being dead, and neither of those was available to him, so what he was left with was sitting in the dark trying very hard not to do the thing his mind did automatically.
He gave it an honest effort. Let the thoughts come, let them pass, don't hold any of them. That worked for a few seconds at a time before he'd catch himself wondering whether Lance's moon rock should come from the near side or the far side, or whether the flask had a return policy, or what exactly Oz was doing right now, and then he'd have to start over.
He was beginning to understand why Lance said it took him eleven months.
Then, out of nowhere, Sael heard his name.
It was faint and distant, and seemed to belong to a woman.
Sael.
He opened his eyes, and found the stars were where he'd left them. The marble-sized planet hung in the same place, the moon to his left, the void in every direction. Nothing had changed, except that someone had said his name, and there was no one here.
He turned, slowly, scanning the dark. His mana perception was still wide open from the release, which meant he could feel everything within an absurd radius, and everything within that radius was empty. Dust, radiation, the faint gravitational pull of bodies too far away to see. There was no life or mana signature besides his own.
Sael.
It was the same voice again, from the same woman, with the same certainty, as if she were standing beside him and speaking at a conversational volume, yet she was nowhere and the sound had no direction. It didn't echo either, because there was nothing out here for a voice to bounce off of, which meant it wasn't really a voice, or at least not one that was traveling through anything physical.
Sael shaped a small amount of mana around his throat and vocal cords, enough to let his words carry through the vacuum as vibration rather than sound. "Who goes there?"
There was nothing for several seconds, and then, very far away, one of the stars began to brighten. It was subtle at first, and Sael almost missed it among the thousands of other points of light, but this one was growing, its glow deepening from a faint white pinprick to a warmer tone. The longer he watched it, the more certain he became that it wasn't a star at all, because stars didn't behave like that and stars didn't respond to questions.
He waited, and the light kept building, and with it came the faintest edge of a mana presence that made the hair on his arms stand up. The source was far, impossibly far, the kind of distance where light itself took its time arriving, and he could feel it from here. Whatever was out there carried power on a scale that even Sael had a very small frame of reference for.
Sael.
The voice again, and this time from the direction of the light.
"Who are you?" he said.
You lack time, Archmage.
He waited for more, and it came a few seconds later.
The agents of Corruption seek a boy. A vessel for the Aspect. They have been searching for some time, and they are close to finding him. Closer than you would be comfortable with, if you understood what his capture would mean.
This was deeply confusing.
"Who is the boy?" he said. "And who are you?"
The presence behind the light didn't answer the second question.
A child, born ten years ago. A human boy with one eye the color of copper, the other nearly white. He carries a birthmark on his back in the shape of a closed circle with a line through it. His mana signature is dormant and will remain so until his thirteenth year, which is why Corruption has not yet located him through conventional means. They are searching by other methods, and so are we.
Sael went still.
His mother had described that mark to him when he was young, sitting at the edge of his bed, tracing the shape on his back with her fingertip while she told him how she'd found him. She said she'd never seen such a mark on anyone else before. She didn't know what it meant, and it held no power. In the centuries since, he'd stopped thinking about it much, because it had never come up and no one had ever asked.
He decided to set that aside for later.
"We?" Sael repeated.
Find him before they do, struggling one. His location is hidden from us, and from them, but he exists, and he is somewhere in your world, and that is all we know. That is all anyone knows.
The light had started to fade and the voice was growing thinner with it, losing its edges as Sael could feel the mana presence pull back, receding into murmurs.
You lack time, the voice said again, barely there now, the syllables fraying apart as they reached him.
"Wait," Sael said, reaching for the fading presence with his perception. "Who are you? Wait—"
He gathered mana for [Teleportation], locked onto the diminishing point of light, and the spell formed and fired and suddenly, Sael opened his eyes.
...Hmm.
Very confused hmm, this one.
The stars were where they'd been, the planet below, the moon to his left, his core pulsing gently in its unconstrained rhythm, and the void around him empty, quiet and holding no trace of a voice or a light or even a presence of any kind. Sael floated there for a long time without moving, trying to determine whether what had just happened had actually happened.
He pulled up his status.
Sael of Hel — Level 6907 [Archmage]
The levels were real, which meant he'd been out here, and that he'd released his core and gained a hundred levels, and then either he had made contact with that entity, or he'd hallucinated the entire thing in a void-induced trance brought on by an unlabeled flask he'd accepted from a priest he'd known for a few weeks.
He looked at the planet below him, and considered both possibilities for a while.
Then he went to get Lance's rock.