Chapter 43: A Prison of Broken Webs

There were a number of things they had to do, of course, before they could stroll into what was hypothetically the prison of yet another god.

For one thing, they had to make sure the bonus room was relatively stable. The dissolution didn't seem to be progressing, and no one was receiving any new boxes; the injuries of all the various villagers were healed, and now they were all trying to recover.

That was the good part. The bad part was that it was somewhat difficult to explain to them why they weren't trying to immediately kill the Serpent, and in particular why they wanted to go into it.

There was, of course, also the concern that whatever effect was keeping the bonus room up would fail the moment they entered the Serpent.

That one, at least, was a concern that was easy enough to alleviate. Charise was there, shaking her head. "It will not," she said. "This space is tied strongly to what you're holding. As long as it doesn't break, this place won't break, either."

"[Intuitionist] at work?" Misa asked, and her mother grinned at her.

"You know it."

That was not, of course, actually enough for Misa to be satisfied. She had Derivan take her in and out of the prison a few times, quickly, checking if the dissolution had progressed while she was gone — but it had not, and it seemed that Charise was right.

So that, at least, was fine; Misa could come with them.

The second thing they needed to decide was if going into the prison was worth it at all. For that, they collectively decided that it was; they were meant to find answers here, after all, and all they had was the barest beginning of one. The pieces were all there, but they had nothing to put it together. No real idea of what it all meant.

...And, of course, if there truly was another god trapped here, it seemed only right that they try to do for them what they could not do for Onyx. Perhaps it would even be Onyx, again, and there would be a second chance to rescue him, though none of them really thought that would be the case.

Still, it was enough for them. They all linked hands, and Derivan found the part of himself that touched upon Shift; he brought them all up to the wound in the Serpent, where he'd already stepped through with Misa, and pushed at the now-familiar crack in space and time.

They found themselves in a prison of prismatic webs.

It was completely unlike the blank, empty space they'd first found Onyx in, with nothing but a long series of chains trailing up to the figure in the center. This one was lit up by a fractal brilliance that would have been beautiful, if not for the way those very same webs clung to them, a sticky, off-feeling substance that couldn't be easily ignored. It took effort to step through the webs, to make their way deeper into the prison.

And it was a prison — that much was obvious. The further in they got, the denser those webs became; they were forced to stop before they reached the center, for a sheer drop appeared in front of them, the ground disappearing into endless prismatic light.

In the midst of the light, far into the distance, was a single, solitary figure. It was covered in so many dense webs that it seemed nearly impossible for it to move.

It was dressed in red robes that were adorned by golden filigree, flowing around its figure. More striking, however, was the head, or lack thereof; a sphere of roughly-hewn gold sat in its place, a strange, distorted hum rising up around it.

Every time that figure moved — every time it breathed — the light around it would shift and warp, every web twisting into moving and holding it down.

It was also enormous, dwarfing them in size. Onyx had been human-sized, but this god — if it was a god at all — was nearly the size of a small mountain. It was only the fact that the ground they stood on was far above it that they were able to stare down and look at it in full, or else it would have towered high over them, and yet...

For all that they'd made it in here, they realized they didn't exactly know what they were going to do. This wasn't like the chains, where they could weaken them and heal the god; this wasn't like Onyx, either, who knew who Sev was and had been willing to lend them a hand. There was no guarantee this god would want to help them at all.

But there was only one way they could start, really.

"Hello?" Sev called out. His voice echoed strangely in this liminal space, the words somehow bouncing between the webs rather than being absorbed; small fragments of his own, distorted voice came back to him when he spoke, and he grimaced slightly. "We're here to help."

The figure below them shifted. It seemed to glance up at them, though it was hard to tell if it did — the golden orb it had for a head shifted slightly, but there was no face to indicate where it was looking. "Hello?" it called back.

Sev paused.

That was a child's voice. Distorted, yes, and difficult to make out with the way the cobwebs repeated the sound, but that was almost certainly a child. That was the last detail that made it click — the sphere of gold and the golden filigree, the state he was in, like the webs were still ripping away something vital from him.

The way the meteor had shied away from the ghost of Jerome that Misa had somehow summoned, instead of striking him.

"Aurum?" Sev said carefully. The god beneath them jerked — then winced when the webs tightened around him.

"That's me," the god said. "Can you help me? I'm — I'm stuck."

The smallest waver in the god's voice. Just the slightest hint that he was afraid, though he should have been bawling by now, if the age of his voice was any indication. But who knew how gods worked? Onyx had been humanlike, but he was one example out of many.

"Do you know where you are?" Sev's tone was gentle.

"No," Aurum admitted. "I dunno... I don't remember much, actually. I remember being scared. I'm less scared now. 'Cause I can't remember what I'm supposed to be scared of, I think? I feel like that should be scary... but it's not."

A short pause.

"It's nice to talk to someone again," he added. "It's been lonely here. I don't have any of my angels. They usually take care of me. I remember one of them finally came back... they looked so worried. I was really happy to see them. And then... I dunno what happened after that."

Another pause.

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"Can... can you keep talking?" Aurum said. "I just... wanna know that you're there."

"...We're here," Sev answered. He didn't trust himself to say any more; beside him, he could feel how tense all of his companions were. Misa let out a quiet fuck, and winced as the sound echoed more than she wanted it to.

"Oh, okay," Aurum said. "Thank you."

"He really was just a child?" Vex said quietly. "I thought maybe Jerome was just delusional. Or he was tricked. The way everything was coordinated..."

"His angels were probably just as scared as he was," Misa answered. Of the four of them, she was the most visibly angry, though she didn't seem to know where to channel that anger. There wasn't anything her to punch, or block, or...

There was just this. A lonely, scared child, wrapped up in prismatic webs that seemed to be — what, stealing his memories? But Onyx had remembered who he was; he'd remembered Sev, and he knew enough to comfort his cleric. What was different here? What made this different from what happened with Onyx?

They were in a dungeon simulation of a bonus room. Was this part of the simulation, or was this external to it?

"Can you tell us what you do remember? Anything about yourself that you remember?" Sev asked, before the silence could stretch on for too long — already, he could see Aurum beginning to fidget beneath the webs, as if forgetting that they were there. Every so often he would move too much again, and the webs would tighten around him, and he would remember.

"Um... yeah! Yeah. I dunno. I don't remember much." Aurum seemed to try to gather himself. "My name's Aurum, but you already knew that. I'm a god, I guess? Never really felt like it. But I have a bunch of angels, and sometimes they tell me what to do, if I'm not sure. They play with me a lot, when I get bored, and they teach me things. Sometimes they get a little sad, 'cause they tell me I can't grow up. They dunno why; they say it's just the way it is.

"Sometimes I get people that pray to me, and I wanna help them. But I don't know how to help them, and I think sometimes I hurt them instead... I try not to. The angels told me I can't just give away powers. I gotta think. There are rules. I don't remember the rules...

"I wanna see them again." Aurum trembled a little bit in his spot, the movement causing a dozen webs to shake along with him, scattering into fractal cracks. "I miss them. I miss the people that prayed to me, too. I like them, even if they're not all very good, But I don't remember any of their faces—"

Aurum stopped talking, and began to cry.

It was an odd sight. He drew up into himself, breaking a few of the webs as he did so, and not seeming to care as some of the other webs tightened around him, and then he just... shook. His shoulders heaved. But he was quiet, no sound escaping from him.

"Aurum?" Sev said, and then when the god didn't reply and just kept crying, he sighed. "Aurum, we're going to figure something out, okay? Just... give us some time."

He turned to Derivan, and spoke quietly. "He's not pretending, is he?"

"Not to the best of my knowledge," the armor answered. "I... we must find a way to free him. We cannot leave him like this."

"I agree," Vex said. His voice was small, and he looked on the verge of tears himself, but damn if the lizardkin didn't also look determined.

"He's also actually a child," Misa muttered. "How... why? A child shouldn't be a fuckin' god."

"We're going to get him out," Sev said. "We're going to figure out what to do with him after that, but for now... whatever this is, I want to tear it down."

"Easier said than done," Misa said. She rammed her mace into a nearby cobweb — not difficult, considering the things were everywhere, and clinging to them even now — and the weapon simply slid through, leaving the web intact behind it. "These things look fragile, but they're not."

"When you attack them," Vex pointed out. "We can move through them fine. Aurum can too, a little bit. He broke a few just now."

"So they're impervious to attacks, but not... movement?" Misa frowned. "That doesn't make any sense."

"They are not impervious to attacks," Derivan said. "They are impervious to weapons." He demonstrated by striking through one of the webs near him; it tore apart easily enough as his arm struck it, and fragments of glittering light fell to the ground.

Vex watched for a moment, then began to strike out with his dagger. A series of quick, precise strikes — not at the webs, but in the air, carving out runes — and a spell circle glowed; from that spell circle came a burst of ice that blasted forward, cutting through a number of webs...

...and leaving them intact and unharmed afterwards, having gone through the webs with barely a whisper. The wizard grimaced. "I was hoping that would work," he said. Derivan patted him gently on the back.

"Manaburn worked before, didn't it?" Sev suggested.

"On the chains, and it spread through them all. I don't want to actually set this place on fire," Vex said with a grimace. "Aurum's still trapped in most of those webs, and I don't know if it'll hurt him."

"We can't run through every single one of these webs," Misa said. "If we go down there we're going to be as trapped as Aurum is."

"There is what you are holding," Derivan said. "The spark that we retrieved from the dungeon. It was able to preserve the village in some way — prevent its full dissolution, yes? Perhaps it can serve another purpose here."

He paused, looking around. "Even if we are able to remove these webs... we do not know how to return Aurum to his plane. It is not a true solution. Nor do we know how to preserve your village, Misa, so that we can return to the dungeon without them being destroyed.

"We also don't know how to use this," Misa said, lifting up the spark to look at it.

She paused. The rest of them did, too, staring at what was in her hands.

It was pulsing with a golden light.

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