Edge Cases

67 - Book 2: Chapter 4: Interlude - Velykos

The earth was quiet today.

Often, Velykos would be able to hear echoes of emotion from the earth, through his connection with Nillea. Sometimes it was fear, like there was something big coming, and little could be done to change its course; sometimes it was anger, like there was something truly wrong, and the earth was shaking in its desire to fix it. More often it was smaller gentle, happy trembles, or sad little quakes.

It had been most active when those strange adventurers were here the odd priest, the little lizard, the protector and the fighter. The earth never seemed silent at all when they were around, not even when they left for that dungeon of theirs. It was only when they left truly left, on their diplomatic mission to Elyra that the earth settled. And that was... strange.

It left Velykos wondering what their significance was. Or was it them that was significant? Perhaps it was something else that was following them. Whether that something was a light or a shadow... only time would tell.

As for him, it was time for him to leave on his own journey. He had been enlightened, in a manner of speaking; something truly important to him had been changed, and Velykos would not allow it to stand.

First, though. The Guildmaster wished to speak with him. And he suspected he knew what she wished to talk about.

"I am here," Velykos said into the air. It was where the Guildmaster had said to meet her, and he had no doubt she was there, only hidden.

A woman was indeed standing near him. He didn't jump he simply turned and bowed his head respectfully. "Guildmaster."

"Velykos," she said, returning the greeting.

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Velykos turned his gaze towards the sky. It was night, of course, which meant only the night of the moon shone down on them, and [The Walls Have Ears] told him there was something deeply wrong with that fact. The Guildmaster, too, was troubled he could see it in her posture.

"There's something wrong with the sky, isn't there?" the Guildmaster said. She sighed. "I could glean that much. They tried to tell me more, but I couldn't retain anything. I'm not used to being on the other end of that kind of magic."

"There is," Velykos rumbled. Stone and pebble rained down his chin when he spoke; he wished it wouldn't, sometimes. It gave his voice a gravelly quality that many found intimidating. "Something is... missing."

"Missing," the Guildmaster echoed, and she stared into the sky. Velykos felt her heartbeat, slow but steady. He felt the beat of her emotions, too; there was a weight pressing down on her, a certain sadness. A small part of her recognized what was missing, just like he did.

"I trust those four to keep figuring things out on their end," the Guildmaster said eventually. "But I'm getting a lot more reports of errors cropping up in the system, for old and new adventurers alike. They're not significant errors by any means, and it's possible I'm just getting more errors because I'm asking for them to be reported, now. But there's a definite trend."

"And if what they said about the gods are true," Velykos said. "Then we may be running out of time."

"We have decades," the Guildmaster said. "We're lucky that the four of them have figured out this much on their own, and they're on their way to get more answers. But that doesn't mean we're going to do nothing with what they've given us."

"No," Velykos agreed, though he was at a loss on how they would explore more on their own. "But what will we do?"

"Research, mostly," the Guildmaster said with a sigh. "The Guild is going to leverage its contacts to find out what the Kingdoms have managed to uncover about the history of this world. They know more than they're saying, but I don't think they know the stakes."

"And we cannot tell them what the stakes are," Velykos said. "Not because we do not want to, but because they have even greater difficulty than we do remembering that something is wrong."

"That's the gist of it," the Guildmaster said.

"It is strange that those four can remember, and we cannot," Velykos mused.

"If we knew why, we'd be a lot closer to understanding the crux of this problem, I think." The Guildmaster frowned slightly. "I've spoken to the J'rokksur leaders about this. Misa's parents Charise and Orkas. They think it has something to do with the reality anchor thing."

"And what do you think?" Velykos asked curiously.

"I don't know," the Guildmaster admitted. "It's an easy answer, but it doesn't explain everything. We know how they got their reality anchor, so we could try sending in a team to get one, but..."

"It is dangerous," Velykos said, and the Guildmaster nodded.

"The conditions they were able to get their anchor in are rather specific," she said. "And I don't have a good feeling about sending people into a random dungeon break. Max already tried teleporting into one, and the fact that she didn't manage it is a bad sign. It might not be survivable outside that specific circumstance."

For a moment, they were silent. And then the Guildmaster looked at him. "What about you? What are you planning to do?"

"I must understand in more detail what is happening to the gods," Velykos said. "I have some idea now, of what might have happened. Of who I might have met, and what might have been changed in my past. But I cannot know for sure. I think, perhaps, if I travel back to the quarry that I originally came into being in..."

"Would that work?" the Guildmaster asked him, and this time it was his turn to go silent for a while.

"There are traces left in the earth, always," Velykos said eventually. "They are difficult to track, even for elementals such as I. But it is not impossible. Not with divine assistance, and assistance from the system."

"I'm not sure I would be so quick to rely on the system."

"I do not think the system is evil." Velykos chose his words carefully, seeing the doubt in the Guildmaster's eyes. "But I do believe it is... unchecked. It appears to be a solution to a problem we cannot see."

"It's not a very good solution," the Guildmaster said, still doubtfully. Velykos nodded.

"That, I agree with," he said. "It is incomplete. Perhaps it was rushed. Or perhaps the problem at hand cannot be solved. We cannot say until we know more."

"And we won't know more until our efforts pay fruit," the Guildmaster sighed, and then she looked up at Velykos again. "I know I've asked before. Are you sure you don't want me to send an escort with you?"

"An escort would be difficult for me," Velykos explained, though not unkindly. "My needs are not the same as that of most mortals. I do not need to pause to rest or eat, and while I could accommodate them, I feel it would only slow me down."

He could take care of himself. Stone elementals were hard to hurt to begin with, due to some passive status effects the race had. And more importantly, this was something of a personal journey for him; he understood and appreciated the Guildmaster's desire to make sure he was safe, but this was something he felt he needed to do alone.

"Actually," the Guildmaster said. "I have a new team that might be perfect for you, there."

"Oh?" Velykos tilted his head curiously.

"They're a veteran team made of ," the Guildmaster said. "They don't need to eat or sleep, just like you. But they're all still... adjusting. The change from mortal to immortal has been hard on them."

Velykos had a lot of questions about that, but he focused on what was the important detail to him. "Do they need help adjusting?"

"Yes. And I think you'd be a good guide for them."

Velykos hesitated. "...This journey I wish to take is personal," he admitted. "But not so much that I cannot bear company, I think."

There was a parallel of sorts here that he thought might help, even.

"Thank you," Velykos added, though the words weren't strictly necessary, and the Guildmaster gave him a nod.

They stared at the sky for a moment more, in a moment of strange solidarity. Different as they were, Velykos thought that the Guildmaster was perhaps one of the few here that might understand how he felt; both of them understood that something had been stripped away from them, and their best efforts had yet to yield any real results. There was too much they still didn't know, and they couldn't rely on Sev's team to find out everything.

But even for someone immortal, there was only so much time that could be spent on quiet moments.

"I will let you know anything I find," Velykos said, turning to leave.

"I'll do the same," the Guildmaster agreed. "I'll have the new team meet up with you shortly. Give them about an hour."

Velykos nodded.

It took precisely forty-eight minutes for the team to arrive. The five of them came dressed in heavy clothing, obscuring all but the most prominent of their features; simply put, they looked vaguely humanoid, and nothing else. Velykos couldn't help but wonder if this wouldn't be suspicious to other mortals.

"Eh, it ain't more suspicious than showing our faces," the team leader had told him when he'd asked. Herald, his name was? Or perhaps it was Harold? He'd never gotten a handle on human names. "Just gotta be careful around people is all. Will we be goin' through a lot of cities and the like?"

That was a good question. Velykos hadn't actually kept up to date on the development of villages and cities. "I do not think so," he said. "I am merely headed for the quarry I was born in, to find traces of an old friend. There is a town nearby, but it is on the other side of that quarry, I think."

"Good," the captain said. "Less complications that way. You ready to get goin'? I gotta say, it'll be nice to have a healer on our team for once."

Velykos took a moment to watch the five of them, curious. They were quite different from what he'd expected, when the Guildmaster had first mentioned new immortals that needed to adjust to their new life but he supposed he had no frame of reference for how a mortal would act after the transition. Perhaps there wouldn't be a difference at all, until years and years had passed, and they had accumulated the same sort of experience a typical immortal had.

The captain was the most at ease in his new form, if Velykos was reading his body language correctly. He could never really be sure, and he was missing a lot of the cues he normally had; no heartbeat, no temperature, no strange distributions of blood for him to make inferences with. But he seemed relaxed and at ease, with just the slightest bit of tension when he spoke.

Two lizardkin-shaped individuals seemed the next-most well adjusted. They stood close together. Siblings, perhaps? They glanced at one another occasionally, and Velykos could feel the way they would tap their feet nervously against the ground every so often, or the way their tails would touch the ground and then jerk back, like they didn't want to be reminded of the new, strange weight.

There was an orc Velykos was pretty sure the largest figure there was an orc, though he could have been wrong who seemed not to care too much about his new status as a skeleton. His discomfort seemed to be with something else; he moved like he expected everything to be heavier, and it bothered him that it wasn't.

And the last one... That poor man would need Velykos' guidance the most, he thought. The Guildmaster had spoken to him before about this one. The human wasn't coping well. His body felt like it didn't belong to him, the way Velykos understood it, and it was causing him no small amount of mental distress. In a way, he could sympathize stone elementals were very much the same way, in that they were always sculpting themselves into a body that better suited them but he understood that the young man's situation was fundamentally different.

Not too long ago, he would have asked Nillea for guidance. But now...

Now he wondered. Sev had given him ideas. Perhaps he could try something different.