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The moment the series of Teleports finished, Purple immediately seized hold of the ambient aether flows to re-anchor himself and flung out a wide web of invisibly-thin filaments of essence to claim the immediate surroundings as his domain. The actions were instant, automatic, and critical. Purple's domain shielded all within it from direct divination. He was the reason that Carlos and Amber could afford to focus exclusively on the problem of teleport traces, rather than having to spend some of their efforts and mana on warding off other types of spells that would find them.
He couldn't help with designing the new spells they were working on, but they really didn't need him to. He handled other things so that they could devote themselves fully to their spellcraft, and he was content with that. In fact, he didn't really want to help with crafting spells, anyway. He'd tried to learn once, listening in on their lessons and experiments, and it had been one of the most confusing experiences of his existence. The tiny little essence structures they worked with were undeniably efficient, but their patterns had such bizarrely contradictory combinations of traits that he couldn't make any sense of it. How could pieces with such absolute inflexibility create arrangements that were so flexible? How could great tapestries of so many pieces working together, all toward the same common goal, be rendered completely non-functional by even the tiniest flaw in a single piece?
Purple could track and store the designs they made, as well as the history of changes to those designs. With Carlos's guidance, he could even tweak certain things, such as the precise twisting of a Teleport's destination coordinates that he had just now automated. Actually creating such things was beyond his understanding, however, and he was better off putting his attention into matters that he understood.
The web that defined and claimed his domain slammed into a nearby cliff. Unlike how a spell might behave, Purple's web adapted and began digging into the rock of the cliff face, incorporating the section of earth into his influence. It took a lot more investment than air, but the result would be much more potent and simpler to control — if they stayed in this place long enough for it to matter, which seemed unlikely. Even that didn't take much of Purple's attention to handle, though, so he focused on observing all the people in his domain.
While Carlos and Amber were busily tinkering with spell designs, everyone else was mostly just standing around. Haftel kept flipping a dagger. Carlos was responding to something Lornera had just said. "I know, they'll work through the same trick faster now that they've seen it, but we need to have something ready in case we don't figure out a new trick in time."
Lornera reluctantly nodded and subsided, settling calmly to wait.
Something about that felt wrong to Purple, but he wasn't sure what. He pushed an idea at Carlos.
Carlos considered briefly, then cleared his throat and spoke to Lornera, "If you don't mind, we'll have our dungeon core establish a bond with you. It will enable us to speak mind-to-mind, which can be much faster than vocal speech." He added a telepathic aside to Purple, [See if you can avoid letting on that you're sapient, please. I'm not ready to trust her with that secret just yet.]
Purple tentatively extended connecting lines of essence and mana toward her. However friendly she might seem, and however much they had closed the gap, Princess Lornera was still terrifyingly strong. She accepted the bond the moment it came close enough to her, and Purple relaxed slightly.
He considered the feelings she was unconsciously sending over the bond. She was strangely focused. Excessively focused, really. She was filled with an all-consuming determination to protect and aid House Carlos, to the exclusion of all other thoughts. It felt like she was so fixated on that one concept that, even for matters directly related to it, she wouldn't be able to think through anything complex.
Just as Purple realized that, Carlos cast something and sent a mental alert to accept the next Teleport. The new spell had a closed valve near its mana reservoir, with a timed switch to open it, leading to… a bewildering structure that turned back on itself after a split fork. Another offshoot branched off before the fork, ending with something that spoke of sharpness and motion. [Okay, let's see if that did the trick. Millions of microscopic mana blades set to shred every bit of mana in the area.]
Purple's domain automatically snapped back into existence around them all in their new location, and he focused his thoughts on what else he could do to help. What could any of them do to help? His attention flickered across each person present.
Haftel's daggers, however potent they might be against ordinary warriors, would be useless against the overwhelming power of King Elston Kalor. His diplomatic skills might be valuable in many situations, but Elston's wrath was beyond the reach of diplomacy. His experience leading an adventuring party could conceivably be useful, but Purple couldn't think of how.
Noralt's armor, strength, and control over metal would all fail against Elston.
Sconter, despite his great size, could be astonishingly stealthy. That… might actually work against Elston? Purple had no idea how much perception enhancement the Kalor royal soul plan included. He didn't see any way for that to help the rest of them, though.
Esmorana, the adventuring team's mystic, could flatten an army of lesser fighters with a controlled hurricane. Elston would plow right through her strongest winds without a care.
Trinlen was a trained mage. He lacked the raw power to contend with Elston, but he might be able to contribute ideas to Carlos's and Amber's fervent work on more spell designs. Purple pushed that idea at Carlos, and Carlos immediately shared a view of their work with Trinlen.
Ressara was not a combatant of any sort, but she was creative. Her main achievements so far had all involved soul structure concepts, and they didn't have the time to implement a new soul structure, but maybe she could think of a useful idea anyway. Purple pushed that idea at Carlos as well, and this time Carlos redirected it to the adventurers with an instruction to bring to his attention any idea that they judged was promising.
Lorvan and Ordens, the royal guards… They were clearly out of their depth. This was beyond the bounds of what they were trained and equipped for.
Finally, Purple's attention returned to Lornera. She was a princess; a royal; a scion of the Crown. In raw power, she was undoubtedly the strongest person present, but even she was outmatched by her father. Her training and experience might be useful, for it was surely far broader than that of any royal guard, but she was handicapped. She couldn't think clearly with her current mental state. Amber's advice had enabled Lornera to act, but not to strategize. They needed something more to unlock her full capabilities.
Purple reached out to Carlos once more, wordlessly asking for guidance on how to break Lornera out of her self-imposed mental lock. Carlos sent back a wordless bundle of concepts in a rapid mental pulse. The method would depend on context knowledge. They would need to understand the origins and causes of the problem in order to figure out how to resolve them. It would likely take considerable time, attention, and analysis. And most of all, Carlos was very busy with critically urgent work at the moment and couldn't afford to spare the attention for anything else right now.
Purple paused to mull it over. He could try to learn the necessary context on his own, but that would break Carlos's request that he conceal his sapience. Ideally, Carlos would tackle the problem himself, and that would reveal nothing about Purple, but Carlos was too busy. Maybe he could pretend to be Carlos? Carlos's mental voice always went through Purple, after all.
He took a few moments to consider how Carlos's mind felt. Then, doing his best to imitate that feeling, he sent a request to Lornera for context information about her inner conflict. Her mind seemed to stumble and filled with confusion for a moment, then suddenly snapped back into focus. A barrage of images and sounds poured into Purple's mind. He was briefly overwhelmed, but then realized they were memories, and he set about cataloging them.
Most of the memories were of the last few days. He saw King Elston constantly pacing, over and over again. The man had been furious about being wounded and upset that the wounds had not yet healed. Lornera had heard him say, "The Crown must be strongest," more times than she could count. Hints of shame and regret tinged those memories, as she now realized that she had misunderstood what Elston had meant — that he had been talking about his own personal strength, not the strength of House Kalor as a whole.
Lornera had believed, at the time, that Elston's assessment of House Carlos matched her own; that he believed that strengthening their ties to the Crown, and thereby securing the support of their unprecedented magecraft for the Crown, was of the utmost importance. She had stood in absolute solidarity with him, right up until the moment when he pronounced a death sentence on them instead.
Then, before she could even begin to process the shock of that revelation, she had found herself compelled to move in violent opposition to him. She believed House Carlos's loyalty was crucial to the Crown's security, and her loyalty to the Crown demanded that she must take action in accordance with that belief. Even now, that demand remained in force. Yet, that same loyalty also demanded that she respect the leadership of the king, for he was the head of House Kalor, the head of the Crown, and part of the purpose of the loyalty soul structure they all bore was to prevent conflict within the house.
Lornera could not disregard either demand of her loyalty. She was incapable of that. But how could she possibly fulfill both at once?
As Purple digested this information, a question burst out before he could even think about holding it back. The question poured forth as a wordless query centered around the singular concept of an incredulous "Why?" As it slammed into Lornera's mind, Purple considered whether he needed to clarify it or put it into words, but concluded that it was fully formed as is. The focus of his incredulity, the idea of a grown person who did not already have that loyalty structure building such a thing into themself, was part of the original impression. So was the matter of how it could possibly benefit her.
More memories poured into Purple's mind. Lornera as a child, learning accounts of internal strife within other houses; uncounted noble scions turned on their own siblings in order to secure their inheritance of the house's lordship. Sometimes, they even killed their parents, just to inherit the lead position sooner. Lornera pitied all the other noble houses, for they could never truly trust each other completely the way the Crown did.
Purple saw from Lornera's viewpoint again, this time as a near adult, as she journeyed into the Wilds to merge her first set of soul structures. The royal guards escorting her fought off countless monsters without the slightest hesitation or lapse in courage. She envied their certainty, and she looked forward to when her own loyalty would be so strongly bolstered as to remain unshaken no matter the danger.
Then later, with her soul plan fully developed, Lornera lay in bed one morning, sorely wanting to sleep some more. She dismissed the temptation with laughable ease, not truly considering it even for an instant. Disrupting her training schedule would delay the improvement of her capabilities, which would be a disservice to the Crown, so she got up and industriously set about preparing for her day.
More examples came one after another, some large and many small, of other incidents where her loyalty aided her. It gave her confidence. It gave her certainty. It gave her discipline. It cut through hesitation. It reinforced her morale. Under its guidance, she could commit absolutely and exert herself to the utmost. Nothing could faze her in her loyal service to the Crown.
Except… Now it was giving her conflict, and she had no idea how to handle that.
Purple absently noted Carlos cursing and teleporting them again. He'd been scrying their previous location, reasoning that the scrying connection would only lead through one step of their teleportation sequence, and apparently the royal mages had deciphered the mess left by the Mana Shredder spell surprisingly quickly.
Purple's focus remained on Lornera's dilemma. His part in the repeated teleportations was fully automated by now. As he had observed his friends do, he set about formally describing the problem: Lornera's loyalty soul structure was demanding two mutually exclusive things. Potential solutions: resolve the conflicting demand, adjust the demands to no longer be exclusive, or remove the soul structure. He immediately dismissed the last solution, as Lornera would never accept that, and she was too strong for them to force it on her.
Making the demands stop being exclusive… was not viable. For that, they would have to convince Elston to stop trying to kill them. Unless he could convince Lornera that helping them against Elston was not disrespecting Elston's leadership, somehow? He didn't see any way for that to be possible.
Resolving the conflicting demand… How could he convince Lornera that loyalty to the Crown did not, in fact, require respecting the king's leadership? That seemed like a rather large stretch; too large to be feasible. What if he restricted the scope? Reducing scope had worked for a number of magical things that had initially been too large. The natural scope restriction for this would be that this specific situation was an exception, but if that would work, then Lornera should have already considered it.
What scope reduction would work? Purple had no idea, but he had other people he could ask. He reached out to… Not Carlos or Amber, actually. They were busy and did not want to be disturbed. He reached out to Ressara instead, presenting his dilemma to her.
Ressara responded almost instantly with a step by step procedure. Purple thanked her profusely and set about following it. First step: Establish an exception that Lornera can readily accept. Make it something extreme, as indisputably counter to the Crown's interests as you can think of.
[Lornera, hypothetically, if your father decided to annihilate his own house, destroying House Kalor, would your loyalty demand that you respect his leadership in that decision?]
Lornera's thoughts screeched to a halt. [What!? That would be insane!]
Purple calmly persisted. [Yes. And if it somehow happened anyway, would your loyalty demand that you respect it?]
A few seconds passed in stunned silence before Lornera responded. [No. That would not be leadership. I could never respect such a self-destructive decision.]
First step complete. Purple pulsed in satisfaction and moved on. Second step: Broaden it into a category and convince her to accept the category. Make sure it's a category that is relevant to us.
[So, decisions by the king that actively harm the Crown do not demand respect from your loyalty?]
Lornera mulled that over for a while, then slowly nodded. [Such decisions would be folly, not leadership.]
Second step complete. Time for the third and final step: Connect the category to our situation.
[Elston's decision to attack us is a decision that actively harms the Crown, and therefore is folly that does not demand respect. Correct?]
Purple realized in that moment that Lornera had actually been paying very little attention to him. Her mind had been obsessively focusing on the need to help House Carlos, and she responded to his questions only because she assumed they were in some way connected to that. Now, she was turning the entirety of her attention to his latest question with all the same obsessive focus. He felt rather small, with all of her restrained power seeming to loom over him.
Then, finally, Lornera relaxed. Tension drained out of her body, her shoulders slumped, and the obsession that had filled her mind receded. She took a long, slow, deep breath, then raised her head. [Yes. That is correct. And that resolves my conflict, at least for now. Thank you.]
She blinked and shook her head, then looked directly at Purple's crystal. [I know that was you, by the way. I sensed the fluctuations of mana involved. Your imitation of Carlos was good, but I could tell the messages originated with you, without being relayed from him.]
She glanced at where Amber was assembling another new spell. [As for preventing teleport tracing… Now that I can think properly, I remember the report of how a thief — probably working for Nyralis — foiled pursuit after escaping the main Kalor vault.]
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