Chapter 1438: Not Alone
Graycastle. Neverwinter.
The Astrologer of Dispersion Star worked at his usual pace, moving through the design manuscripts the Ministry of Industry had sent, his companions keeping their own calculations alongside his.
The job had no visible end. But it was, unexpectedly, satisfying — unlike star observation, which invited the sky to withhold whatever it chose, these calculations could be run to a conclusion. Every outcome was determinable, every direction of design legible in the numbers. He spent time at the new astronomical telescope when he could, but over the past two years his attention had settled increasingly on the Arithmetic Academy. The deeper he went into the work, the more he heard Roland’s words from that first conversation: employ numbers to describe everything. The curves and lines produced by those numbers had a coherence to them, a coordination he couldn’t quite account for. Whether the creations determined the numbers or the numbers preceded the creations — he still wasn’t sure.
If we achieve a sufficient grasp of this knowledge, could we determine an unknown object’s properties through formulas alone — without a material object in hand?
This was the association that made him look forward to each new problem.
“Research Project 26’s computation returns 3475. Well beyond the margin.” His assistant pressed carefully on the calculating machine and reported it.
The machine was rare — crafted personally by Anna, fewer than ten sets in Neverwinter, all distributed between the Administrative Office and the Arithmetic Academy.
The Astrologer nodded, lifted his pen to record the result.
The light above his head flickered.
The bulb buzzed, something in the circuit wavering. Everyone stopped what they were doing and waited for it to settle.
It did not.
“Crash!”
A sharp sound from the next room — the sound of something hitting stone — and not gently.
He frowned. The room next door stored instruments belonging to the ancient witches, objects that had survived more centuries than most buildings in this city. He had warned the apprentices more than once to move slowly in that room, to use care with every surface.
The apprentice came out at a run, face pale and eyes too wide.
“My lord — the skeleton is floating!”
The Astrologer crossed the corridor in a few steps and stopped in the doorway.
The skeleton — which had been secured, sealed, enclosed — had come apart. Not collapsed: dispersed, each piece finding its own arrangement, while a radiance bloomed from the center of the configuration. It moved like something waking. Like something that had been waiting a long time to be called.
This cannot be.
Only a few individuals in Neverwinter even knew what a carrier was. Setting aside the ancient witches in their blob-forms, no ordinary person could use those objects. The tunnel running beneath the Arithmetic Academy to the central carrier existed precisely because of this — the Academy housed these artifacts as a consequence of that connection.
The light held for perhaps thirty seconds. Then the skeleton fell back into stillness and drifted to the floor in slow pieces.
“My lord, I was only cleaning the dust from the surface with a wet cloth — I swear I did nothing else.” The apprentice pressed himself against the wall, voice tight.
“This is nothing to do with you. You may go.” The Astrologer kept his voice even and waited for the door to close behind the boy.
From the folds of his robe he drew a key. A specific key, the only one that opened the passage downward.
There was more than one ancient witch in blob form in Neverwinter, but the one beneath the Academy was different. By all accounts she had no active consciousness — she could only respond to questions, and precisely because of this she needed to be restrained, to prevent the carrier body from acting on reflex. He was not unfamiliar with her: she had contributed meaningfully to verification computations more than once. But he had never forgotten Lady Pasha’s warnings. When awakened, a carrier body could tear any human to pieces with minimal effort.
He had to confirm this was not her.
He descended.
The central carrier had not moved from its position. But it lay entirely limp, tentacles twisted loosely together, no movement in any part of it. Devoid of life in a way that was different from sleep.
No. What happened?
He stood there a moment, the silence of the tunnel pressing in around him, and recognized that whatever had occurred was entirely beyond his knowledge and his tools.
He turned and ran.
“Someone — go to the castle immediately! Find Lady Scroll!”
The brightness that had come through the network died quickly. The gray node that had briefly blazed held for a few seconds afterward — then went out, the way a candle goes out when the wick runs out, all at once.
Did I fail?
Celine watched the network in silence. In that instant she had formed a connection — clearly, undeniably — but then the light had simply ceased. Her plan had been to establish equilibrium between the two ends and allow Lady Eleanor to parse the four instruments from a distance. That hope was gone now, dissolved like a shape in fog.
When she reached toward the network again, her focus scattered. Mask’s intrusion into her consciousness had accumulated past the point where she could simply set it aside.
“Without the God’s Stone mine’s support, the network can’t sustain itself indefinitely. Magic power is required to operate it — why did you think I allowed those magic cores to drift?” Nassaupelle shrugged with all of his arms. “Your determination is genuinely admirable, if inexplicable. But I’ll be accepting your spirit and consciousness now.”
“That I cannot permit.”
A third voice. From behind Nassaupelle.
Celine went still. The voice was familiar in a way that exceeded recognition — it carried a rightness to it, like finding something she’d assumed lost so long ago she had stopped acknowledging the loss. Familiar and yet not entirely, a quality she couldn’t name.
She turned.
A woman stood silently behind Nassaupelle. Long hair that reached her ankles. Brows drawn in clean, precise lines. A pair of gray eyes with something languid in their depth. She looked, in the way that mattered, exactly like the other two of the Three Chiefs.
“Lady — Eleanor!”
The name came out of her before she could hold it back.
Four hundred years. More than four centuries since she had last stood in the same space as the creator of the Union.
“You must be Celine? I recognize your voice.” Eleanor looked around, unhurried. “And this is clearly a senior demon.” She surveyed the space as though cataloguing it. “Where are we? A new spirit vessel of some kind?”
“I’ll explain everything — but not now, there’s no time!” Celine pushed past four centuries of emotion and focused. “Please — help me reactivate the magic power cores and drive this demon out. If we don’t do it now, it will all be too late!”
“Hahaha — hahahaha—”
Mask’s laughter was multiple voices stacked, slightly out of phase. “I was wondering what you’d done. And here I thought you were sending yourself to me in some novel form — but you’ve sent me a gift. Is this specimen powerful? A pity my body isn’t present; combat capability is useless inside this space. As for working out all four cores — the computational requirements alone—”
The sentence stopped.
The smile stayed on Nassaupelle’s face, but nothing was moving behind it anymore.
Above them, the stellar pattern was changing.
A few points of light appeared first — then the expansion accelerated, like a river receiving water from a reversed waterfall, the new flow surging in and pressing against the existing pattern. The revolution of the stars buckled. The new force was not overwhelming the cyclones by meeting them directly — it was bending their rotation, gradually reversing their direction, until counterclockwise motion won out over clockwise, and the two powers braided together around the four magic power cores.
The cores blazed.
The Deity of Gods arrested its descent in a single instant — the deceleration so sharp the soldiers in the plaza were pressed flat to the ground. Red Mist that had been dissipating reversed course and was drawn back in. Liquid crystal, boiled up through the Red Mist Lake, cooled and solidified back into its crystalline form.
“Who are you?!” Nassaupelle’s composure was gone, replaced by something Celine had not heard from him before. “How is this possible from a single person?! To understand the composition of the magic power revolutions this quickly — one person alone cannot—”
“You’re correct that one person cannot.” Eleanor looked upward, both hands extended, as though cradling something vast and weightless. “But I am not alone.”
A sound like a breath held for four centuries, released.
The network’s nodes went dark, one after another, until only the single light representing the Deity of Gods remained — flickering, but present.
The connection between the control hub and Mask’s network had been severed.