Master of the Loop

Chapter 151

Of Godly Means and Prophecies

Sylas pulled back the bow and closed one of his eyes, his fingers itching to let loose, aiming toward a thing he couldn’t see. In front of him stood a stone wall, and beyond it a scarecrow-like target, and he wanted to pierce its head. Taking a deep breath, he stilled his heartbeat and quickly turned to unclench his fingers. The sound of an arrow wasn’t a normal one--it wasn’t that of a simple whistle, but almost of a bullet being shot.

Halfway between him and the wall, he touched upon the iota of energy he attached to the arrow and bullied his mind into swerving the arrow to the harsh right. While the first swerve was fairly easy, the second one--where he re-routed it back toward the target, was a bit harder. Still, the arrow shot past the wall and latched itself into the scarecrow. Not the head, just the upper torso. While still an achievement likely every archer of the Kingdom would drool over, he felt a bit disappointed.

He could consistently curve the arrows around bends and corners and even hit the targets with high accuracy. The issue was where he was hitting those targets. Only about one in five shots were lethal, which was nowhere near enough. Then again, he hardly dedicated a lot of time to training the ‘Soul Arrow’. Considering that, his accuracy was fairly good.

Setting the bow aside, he sat down and drank some ale. The snow had been drifting in chunks from the high sky for hours now, never ceasing or slowing down, piling into a mass that was reaching three-four feet in height across the board. He’d never seen the sheer quantities of this magnitude back on Earth. In fact, where he lived, two feet of snow were considered apocalyptic, let alone double that.

He recalled in one of the loops, toward the peak of the Cold Snap, the snow actually broke five feet--burying most of the children and even some of the adults in size. He didn’t experience it, though. The snow around him melted, even before falling to the ground. It was as though there was an aura of fire around him that disallowed cold to mount and assemble. It was distinctly different from Asha’s, however.

While his was of destructive nature, hers was of protective; rather than melting the snow, she simply... moved it. Shoveled it aside. That distinction further cemented his belief that his powers stem from a seed that was far different from the Gods. His felt more primordial, more unkindly, unfeeling, cold, distant, and bedeviled, almost. Under the scope of those eyes, Sylas' suffering was a bemusing event. Then again, he could be entirely wrong.

That was the thing with magic, he realized--it was beyond vague. Even if some parts of it could be explained in some form of logic, such as talismans, those parts were extensively limited in their scope. The stronger magic, the one that breaks and bends the world, seemed to follow no rules. Such as his Way--Way whose ultimate calling is to make him immune to all and everything, and yet keep him made of warm flesh and blood and bones. Or, perhaps, the Way of the Heartseeker--where he could collapse the reality around him by sacrificing his arm.

Or perhaps that portal over the lake that tapped into the nether and traversed the boundless space between the north and the far south of the Kingdom in a matter of seconds. And then again, there were the steep Shadows, the beings that still shimmered terror in Sylas' heart, even after he had grown stronger. If anything, the terror bounded further.

When he first experienced that fight, many, many, many moons ago, though he was terrified, he didn’t have a frame of reference--for all he knew, it was more common to be that strong than it was not. Now, however, he had that frame. He knew that the strength to bend the world does not come easily, frequently, or even enough to be accepted as existing. By becoming strong himself, he only further realized how much stronger they were. And then there were the dead and the not-so-dead and their kings and queens and hundreds of other tiny and large things that beget a simple question: was

Sylas didn't believe so. Internally, he equated it with energy--back on Earth, while the energy was largely uniform in how it was used, means of acquiring it were insanely varied. From the basic steam engine, to coal burning, to hydropower plants, to solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear reactors... he believed magic here to be the same. While it presented itself in a relatively equal fashion, the sources were seemingly boundless and, just like the energy, varied in effectiveness.

He hadn’t bothered thinking too hard on it, however. After all, he could attempt applying logic to it till the end of the world, and fail to find the uniformity between it all. Magic was merely a term loosely binding together things he, and others, could not understand. Just as the bolts of lightning at some point on Earth were the magic of angry gods, all the things he failed to understand here fall under the umbrella of magic. Well, the difference being this was actually magic.

“Aren’t you biting a bit too much?” Derrek’s voice snapped him back to reality as the one-armed man walked up to him and looked at the bow in his hands.

“What? This?” Sylas cracked a faint smile, lifting up the bow. “No, it’s fine. I’m actually pretty good.”

"Oh? Care to demonstrate?" Derrek asked. The man was draped in several layers of clothes, with a woolen hood almost completely hiding his face. In contrast to Sylas, who wore a ragged tank top and basic leather pants, the passerby would think they lived in two completely different worlds.

Sylas said nothing as he lifted the bow again and picked up an arrow from the nearby, dead trunk of a tree. It was an ordinary, iron-headed arrow that he affixed with a tiny trace of his energy, as per the dictation of the Art, before nocking it against the flexible, sinew-made string of the bow. Following the same procedure as before, he pulled back, closed his eyes, ‘imagined’ the world beyond the wall, and let loose.

The arrow flew straight for a moment before suddenly and rather unnaturally swerving to the harsh right, looping around the wall, and curving right back into the trajectory of the scarecrow. This time, he hit the object’s neck. A bit more satisfying, he mused, as he lowered the bow and looked to the side where he saw slack-jawed Derrek staring at him with eyes wide open. The man seemed mesmerized, awed, and terrified--all emotions rolled into an incredulous expression of a man who had seen something that shouldn’t be seen.

“You... you--you know... Soul Arts?!!” Derrek stuttered in horror. “Who... who are you?!” his question carried a trace of both terror and awe, and yet seemed dominated by a conflict of a heart.

“Me? Just a Chosen One,” Sylas joked, putting down the bow and lifting the gourd, taking another sip. “Blessed by the many to do twice as much,” after a moment of silence, Sylas realized something was strange, prompting him to look at Derrek. To his shock, the man was on the ground--not even kneeling or bowing, but genuinely kowtowing, his head pressed into the cold, hard earth of the winter. His entire body was shaking, but it was not due to the cold. “E-eh? What the fuck?” Sylas mumbled unconsciously, his mind incapable of processing the sight he was taking in quickly enough.

“Blessed Thee be,” Derrek mumbled in the tone that made it seem like a prayer, almost. “Your Light a beckoning force--”

"If you say another word, I will literally chop your fucking head off, Jesus," Sylas stumbled forward and immediately forced the man to his feet. Despite his attempts, Derrek continued to hang his head low, refusing to look at him. "You almost killed me there, you know? Fuck. That cringe was more dangerous than any blade pressed against my throat," he added, shuddering. "Now, explain. What the fuck do you mean my light? I thought I had the brooding, dark boy down pat."

“...”

“Derrek,” Sylas dropped the joking tone and turned serious. “I was just making a joke. I’m not a chosen or whatever the hell you want to call it. I’m just a piece of shit who lucked into strength he shouldn’t have, much like all other dickheads that end up ruling the world. But, I am mightily curious what made you drop to your knees in terror. I imagine there’s a legend of it. So, spill it.”

“It’s... you... you don’t understand,” Derrek mumbled. “The texts--the texts are specific. They don’t lie. The texts never lie.”

“The only thing the texts do is lie,” Sylas said. “They create a myth out of a bush fire. That is their purpose. Now, spill it.”

"No, no, it's different," Derrek repeated, his atmosphere not changing at all. "These... these aren't manmade letters woven into words on old parchments. These are runes carved into... carved into Cairns. They do not lie. They are promises of things to come. And you... you are one of the things to come. I am certain."

“...” Sylas fell silent for a moment. He didn’t believe in prophecies, much less ones anointing him as a chosen one, but he was curious about them. After all, prophecies were a strong thing. A seeming promise by Gods for the things to come made many uncomfortable to discard them as just lies and stories. “Alright, I’ll bite. How do I fit the criteria?” he asked, sitting down on the trunk. “And look at me when you talk. I ain’t gonna kill you. Well, I will if you keep staring at the fucking ground.”

“...” Derrek looked up, his eyes shifting left and right in terror and uncertainty. A grown man was standing in front of Sylas--and not just any grown man, a man made from fire and iron, and was... shivering like a babe in the wind. Even when Sylas held others’ lives in his hands, they never expressed this level of fear. This went beyond just fearing your murderer or death in general. This went into fearing what came after death. "The... the texts.. the texts foretell three things to come."

“...” Sylas didn’t push him, letting the man unload at his own pace.

“F-first, first it speaks of the Shadows,” he said. “Things and apparitions that come clawing from the nether, antithesis to the Gods, bedeviled souls in want of their own Kingdom. Heed, Children of Man--for the coming of the Things beyond Things, for the vultures that shall feed on your fears and terrors. Shadows come in want of swallowing the world. They shall mount an army of the living and the dead and raise the banners of Ruin and Cataclysm. Heed, Children of Man--for they must not succeed.”

“...” Sylas listened carefully, looking for anything out of line. However... there was nothing. Sure, coincidences were there, but like most other prophecies, it was vague, lacking in detail, and could be applied to a hundred different things. While it could literally mean the Shadows, the creatures bounding logic, it could just as well apply to another Kingdom invading.

“Then... then it speaks of... speaks of you,” Derrek lowered his head once again. “Of a man become God.”

“...”

“When the Shadows come to Reign, and the Men feel the darkness gripping--a Man shall beckon Apotheosis, shed his Mortal Coil, and reveal beneath the Godly Spirit of Light and Good. Children of Men, fear the False Ones, for their lies shall slither between you to deceive; the true can only be one, A Man of Heart, a Man of Soul, and a Man of Mind. There can be no other--only one. Godly Divine.”

“...” Sylas frowned. Unlike the first... this one was a bit more specific. However, it was still vague enough to be applied to multitudes.

“I--I always felt on you, felt on you the sense of Heart and Mind,” Derrek added. “Something mists them, but they are there. While odd... it’s... it’s happened before. Valen, too, has traces of it. But... now... now there is a Soul to you, I see. Nobody has all three. Nobody but the Godly Divine.”

“What’s the third thing it foretells?” Sylas asked, steering the conversation away from himself.

“It... it foretells of War,” Of course it does, Syla groaned inwardly. “Where the Living, the Dead, and all those in-between, come join the vast fields where the blood shall flow like rivers and turn into a red sea. And lastly Heed, Children of Man--Heed of the War that is come, a War that shall Break the Unbreakable, and Undo all you thought Impervious. A War that shall turn the Living and the Dead and the Aephos into the red rivers finely corralling into the Red Sea that shall drown your world in sorrow and pain. Children of Man, Heed--for there shall not be a Victor of the War. Shall the War transpire, all shall be Erased. And only the Godly Divine shall know of the Way. Follow the Apotheosis, and you shall be Rewarded, Children of Man."

Both Derrek and Sylas fell silent after, though for very different reasons. While Derrek didn’t dare say anything in the presence of silence, Sylas was mulling over the prophecies. Though he didn’t truly believe them, that didn’t matter--they were not aimed at him. It was clear that people of this world did believe them. And a possibility arose in his mind... that he was summoned specifically because of the prophecies. Or, rather, to fulfill them. Frowning, he felt a lump latch onto his throat, a strange feeling surging in his gut. I’m right, he growled inside his soul. Not entirely... but in part. For at that moment, Sylas realized something that Derrek hadn't--he wasn’t the ‘Godly Divine’. He knew that for one simple reason--the sole Main Quest he had.

It’s Valen, Sylas eyes veered toward the castle where the wheelchair-bound boy currently resided. His story is finally starting to make sense... and so is mine...