Chapter 133: Mercy

Regardless, the Collector would attempt this. It understood well that in some time, it would have had to allow foreign emotions within its system in order to engage certain abilities that were too useful to ignore. Now was an efficient and apt time.

The Breath of Life was versatile, and some Jotnar could theoretically possess the capacity to utilize it in such a way to create constructs of autonomous ice that were quite powerful, scaling directly with the magical energy inputted into them.

This, coupled with the enormous reserves of magical energy already inherent in the species, meant that any construct that the Collector managed to create would be powerful and unlikely to fall behind its own strength to significant degree.

The Collector's Jotnar core was not capable of directly creating constructs, but it could charge cells with their nourishing ice crystals and improve the physical and magical capabilities of any unit enveloped in the breath.

The benefits were double here. The Collector could return the goblin swarm to life, and it could greatly enhance their might with its Breath of Life.

All the Collector needed was to begin to feel mercy in order to activate the Jotnar core. It looked over the corpses of goblins and hovered one of its four hands over them, its black, metallic claws glimmering from the golden light generated from its chest orb.

The Collector focused its intent, and as it did so, its senses sharpened to, honing on the Jotnar core placed within one of its reserve hearts. It focused upon the beating of the blue organ, at the specific type of magical energy within it, and attempted to unlock its power.

The Collector could force the Jotnar core to input the necessary trigger emotion of mercy into it, but overloading its processing unit with a sudden surge of foreign emotions was still something it was hesitant to do.

It first wanted to see if it could conceptualize the emotion on its own terms enough so that it could unlock the core by itself. If it could begin to understand these emotions on its own, it could master them and wield them instead of feeling overwhelmed at their foreignness.

First, the Collector began to conceptualize what 'mercy' was to it.

Mercy, at a fundamental definitional level, was an act of restraint. It was the decision to show restraint when one was capable of inflicting suffering.

The Collector was not a stranger to this type of mercy. In fact, it showed it in fair regularity, opting to grant this type of mercy in varying measures to multiple specimens that it sensed were capable of granting the Collector battle of worth.

The greater the battle worthiness of the specimen, the greater amount of this type of mercy the Collector could manage to muster.

However, the feeling attached to this type of mercy was not the same one required to access the Jotnar core.

No, the type of mercy the Collector was familiar with was predicated largely on desire, and judging by how the Jotnar core did not respond at all to the warmth of desire that the Collector routinely felt, it was suffice to note that the familiar desire the Collector knew was not that which fueled the mercy the Jotnar core understood.

Worth a try.

It would seem the Collector would have to force the Jotnar core's specific feeling of mercy through its processing unit.

The Collector did so, forcibly activating the trigger for the Jotnar core. Various emotions associated with 'mercy' flowed into the Collector, and these were emotions it had utterly no experience with.

Compassion. Forgiveness.

It knew them through basic definitional framework in the same way a tinkerer would know the definitions of terms via written records – through cold, observed knowing, not truly felt understanding.

Yet, unlike before when the Collector felt foreign emotions swell up within it, when the female daemon specimen had allowed her emotions to flow into the Collector, it did not immediately suppress these emotions.

The Collector would tackle them. Attempt to understand them. Know them.

Understand them.

This way, it could utilize its abilities to their fullest. It could not afford to constantly be overwhelmed and pause every single time it desired to use the maximal usage of the Jotnar core's powers.

The Collector let the emotions circulate within it, and as it tried to understand them, an anomalous event occurred. The emotions, as triggers for the activation of a core and therefore the circulation of magical energy, possessed a quality of heat that the Collector could physically feel swelling up within its body.

Like the first time the Collector had felt mana swirling within it as a source of unidentifiable heat.

The heat was intense, almost burning, and the Collector could sense instability in the flow of mana pumping out from the Jotnar heart. Its spirit roots were burning up, causing its internal body temperatures to rise and its mana to flicker in an unstable, crackling blue aura around it.

Once the Collector understood these emotions better, the heat and magical instability would fade. For now, though, it focused its attention on understanding.

The Collector had gathered enough experiences, it surmised, to form enough of a framework to begin to understand these things.

But as the heat of the unstable, irregularly circulating magical energy reached a peak, the Collector found its processing unit strangely overtaken. Its senses became enveloped at first in blinding white that also deafened its auditory systems and numbed its tactile capacities.

Then, the Collector found itself somewhere else. No, not somewhere else, as someone else. It was viewing the memories of another –

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Eru Wun Thamir. Or Eru of the Thamir bloodline, as the humans here would have called him. Had they been alive.

Eru knelt down in the snow, his pale blue skin standing out against the dark fall of Grain whirling all around him. Crystals of ice jutted out from his back, merging into a formation reminiscent of cave stalactites.

From them, deeper blue light emanated, shining right through the Grain. It was through this light that the human corpses were visible. A dozen of them scattered across the top of the ritual cliff Eru had carved out long ago, when the Thamir clan head had declared they were to enter the Cyclic Rest.

The corpses were still fresh, many of them studded with sharp ice crystals that had led to their ends. They were men of these lands, Eru could tell from their tribal tattoos.

Of the Wraith clan, it would appear, judging by the skull tattoos imprinted on their shoulders.

Or was it the Wraith clan?

It was difficult to remember. Human lives were short, and they changed so quickly and so often. They named themselves this clan in one century, that clan in another.

There was a time that Eru, ever the curious one, had crossed the divide of the Rift to build things for the humans and make merry with their drinks and foods. But that was long ago. Three hundred years ago, maybe longer than that.

When the grooves and wrinkles of time, even though they carved their lines on Jotnar faces far slower than they did on human faces, did not find purchase on Eru's skin. When he was hopeful.

Now, he was old. Reaching the twilight of his long existence, ready for his thinning blood and aching bones to return to the White Voice.

Eru was still hopeful. Just a little more realistic.

He no longer believed in teaching the humans the old ways, to connect with the world around them, to hear the White Voice and see where the land was sacred and where life was not to be tampered with. It was far too late for that.

The sacrilegious gods had implanted their tendrils of influence deep into the humans like Facestealers, ensuring that the humans would never again make peace with the Jotnar.

Now, the humans, like the ones he had killed in front of him, attacked Jotnar on sight, sending the mightiest among them known as 'adventurers', believing them monstrosities of a nature that was unknown and to be feared, not known and revered.

Their goddess of war personally brought untold misery and slaughter to any Jotnar that remained below the Rift with the humans.

How many Jotnar had fallen to her chaos-laden greatsword? A hundred? Two hundred? Too many.

Eru wondered how things had gone so wrong in the span of his single life.

Before him, when his father was the Thamir head, the White Voice began to fade, her guidance turning into whispers, then those whispers becoming ever the less frequent.

That was when gods began to drive the Jotnar out. When the war goddess began her slaughter.

When Eru became the head, taking the Shard of Succession from his father, he dealt not with gods and men, but with the rise of the Draconids.

Mighty, fierce creatures that knew only blood and battle whose zealous drive stemmed from a beholding to what they believed was the White Voice, though Eru and the Jotnar knew well that their voice was no true will of the world.

But now, the Draconids were far too many and far too strong. The rise of that one, the one they called the Exile, the one that possessed himself a Shard of Succession, was far too much.

Eru's Shard was dimming.

Its power had been used far too many times, and unlike the Exile, he did not implant the Shard within himself, for doing so was heretical to Jotnar tradition. He wielded it as a weapon, implanted within a staff.

Thus, while Eru's shard lost its light over time, unable to recharge itself with a slumbering White Voice, the Exile only grew more and more strength, like a storm gaining snow and wind as its own body nourished and cultivated the Shard.

Perhaps the Draconids were the true successors of the White Voice. They did have a Shard, after all.

Perhaps not. The humans had stolen Shards as well, using them to fuel mighty weapons or structures.

The presence of a Shard alone necessitated nothing.

The only infallible truth was that the White Voice was gone, or if present, reduced to but the faintest of whispers.

And because the White Voice was gone, the Jotnar knew well: the world was dying.

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