Chapter 48: Ch. 44: Identity

Mageslate- this is a tablet made from magestone. It is used by enchanters to store rune craft that is used for repetitive commands and the runes can crafted to represent certain characters or symbols which enact mundane or magical actions either immediately or after a preset delay. -Catalogue of Inventory for Yondouk's Magical Emporium of Arcane and Mundane Goods

---

Mealtimes had, for the past few days, been a two person affair; a little awkward for the most part, as both occupants of the penthouse came to grips with their circumstances.

Nora was still getting used to the idea of Arthur’s otherworldliness and seemed to almost step on egg-shells around him. For the most part, she seemed to begrudgingly come around and stopped regarding Arthur as a delusioned human who dreamt up an entire word.

At first she'd been mad and they'd almost gotten into a fight over it until Arthur drew parallels with what Nora herself had done; keeping some of her abilities secret from the clan. Begrudgingly, she came around.

Loathe as she was to admit it, that Arthur’s sincerity to the extent he let her monopolise his mundane artefact, the smartphone, sold her on it. He even taught her how to use it just so he could drive home that it was not really made of any arcane material that could take still and moving images and play music.

How Nora loved the music! It was like a balm to her heart. Even if the language was lost on her, the emotion still got through to her. Unbeknownst to Arthur, Nora was still reeling from other issues of her own; she had yet to get over the perceived betrayal by the clan as well as Livierre’s death.

Meanwhile, breakfast had mostly been sylvani staples of the bounty of the Faeriweald’s arcologies, gardens and farms, which meant lots of sauteed mushrooms and sweet dwarpples, or as they were known to Arthur, potatoes.

Alongside that was, of course, another Sylvani favourite, treehoppers, the Faeriweald’s relative of the grasshopper. They were crunchy and soft like a well fried chicken thigh. They could be both a quick snack or a main course if one prepared them with mushrooms the way Nora had done.

“You look exhausted,” Nora put across, interrupting the methodical clinking of utensils between them.

“I guess,” Arthur murmured listlessly. “Lots of work to do in so little time and all that.”

On odd and even days, Arthur alternated between his lessons with Kolvar and swordcraft with Szephia. Szephia’s swordcraft lessons had been gruelling, while the crafting lessons from a [Runic Arboursmith ] who was also a [Shipwright] left his mind exhausted.

Arthur also had a side project with the dungeon shard and mageslate that he’d borrowed from the Djy’veli [Artificer] back when he was working on the dungeon. It felt like so much time had passed in the blink of an eye.

The first days had been spent appraising the level of Arthur’s proficiency in his craft and trying to teach him new skills. Skills like [Appraisal] which he so desperately needed seemed like a goal he had to put his nose to the grindstone for. It had been so frustrating to have a shaky foundation for a self-taught craft; lack of experience could only take someone so far.

So, while the Elder was not perplexed by the glaring holes in Arthur’s foundations, he was rather adamant that something be done about them. In Volemhir's eyes, Arthur’s flight by the seat of his pants would be a very short one if he did not do something about it, and that was after seeing the Mark III’s construction.

Arthur was himself embarrassed to learn that he had forgotten to slap obfuscation enchantments on his magier engines and was working towards remedying that.

And that is how Arthur had found himself as a temporary apprentice under the auspices of Kolvar, the most curious Sylvani Arthur had ever met yet. However short that engagement would be, Arthur wanted to make the most out of it even if it meant he went days without sleep. Sixteen days did not seem like an awful lot of time for teaching ;maybe they knew something he didn’t.

“I think you can afford to take some rest today at least,” Nora murmured as they did the dishes. The Sylvani’s use of chopsticks and way of dress was eerily similar to certain Asian cultures, but the solarpunk vibe of their groves and Ildsteds threw everything off. Eryth seemed to be a mishmash of culture and civilization at varying stages of development.

“Perhaps I’ll do just that,” Arthur said as he dried the utensils before putting them on the drying rack. He massaged the new calluses on the inside of his palms. Szephia had made doubly sure that she ran him through his paces. She, unlike Volemhir, was appalled at his foundations. He had barely mastered the Lightning Shrike sword art. As if on cue, the sound of a windchime pervaded the house.

Arthur sighed, “Speak of the fiend.”

“Huh?” Nora inquired.

“Never mind, also, put away the phone will you? Szephia does not have an in with us like Elder Volemhir does.”

“As you say,” Nora said. “ I’ll finish up here and get some tea out.”

“Certainly,” Arthur said as he went to get the door.

---

“[Mage Scout] Szephia, To what do we owe the pleasure? I thought our sessions were not due for another day?” Arthur started. They were in the living room, the very first room where they’d talked like that when they were just getting accommodated.

“You two are as awkward as a newly espoused couple,” Szephia murmured amidst the clinking of utensils. Nora feigned a cough while Arthur sputtered as the barley tea went down the wrong pipe; tears welled up in his eyes.

“And whose fault do you think that is?” Arthur choked wheezing. He switched his tea for water, the drink had left him with a stinging throat. “ Never mind that, what brings you here?”

Szephia delicately dabbed her lips with a napkin before she regarded the duo; her gaze seemed to linger on Arthur before she spoke.

“The Elder bid me come with a missive for you before we continue your tutelage in swordcraft,” she grinned. “I assume you have not forgotten our arrangement?”

“No, I have not—why all of a sudden?”

“I was asked one thing—” the sylvmaid remarked, leaving the statement hanging by the tone of her voice like dangling bait.

Arthur rolled his eyes exasperatedly and snorted. “Fine I'll bite—what is it?”

“Do you trust your companion?” she asked pointedly looking at Nora. It was Nora's turn to get exasperated; she was cute when flustered, Arthur observed and the words tumbled out of his mouth before he knew—

“With my life—I do,” Arthur said unabashedly.

“Very well. Firstly, an update on your ring of obfuscation and the pendant of Verwandeln,” Szephia started as she sipped from her cup. “Your ring of obfuscation cannot be effective if you're taxing it with your aura. Some things still get through—you mentioned that the ring would warm whenever an inspection skill came your way, yes?”

“Hmm?” Arthur nodded. He had asked because the rings didn’t really come with a manual.

“Then I suppose the Elder was right—the ring is skirting its upper bounds. We shall include aura training.”

“And the pendant?” Nora asked.

“That is simple―” Szephia said, squinting at the artefact on Nora’s chest as it faded into view.

“ Ah I can see you have already bonded with it,” Szephia said, turning to the dhampir with what she assumed was a disarming smile. Nora remained unflappable as she narrowed her crimson eyes at the slyvmaid with an expression that seemed to say, ‘ Well, get on with it.’

“It shall remain on your person regardless of how hard someone else might try to remove it, and that is if they even know where to look at all. Depending on the circumstances, it can change into a brooch, a hair ornament, an earring, or a bracelet. That easily makes it a legendary class artefact .”

Nora looked at the pendant with new eyes.

“That aside,” Szephia sighed as her countenance firmed with seriousness. “We need to divine your Essentia Chronicon before we continue. I fear we have been working on the wrong strengths—”

“I had a feeling—”Arthur grimaced.

“I assume you found the book on Faerieborn and Dragontouched?” Szephia said.

‘So it was left there on purpose,’ Arthur nodded in affirmative and then quirked his brow with a questioning look. ‘But what the hell is an Essentia Chronicon?’

Not expecting the reaction she had been expecting, Szephia frowned before she said, “Essentia Chronicon divination is not something to be taken lightly―”

Arthur stared at the sylvmaid as if she was inane. Of course he did not have first hand experience with that Essentia Chronicon she spoke of—

“Aeris Breath!” Szephia sighed as she threw her arms helplessly. “Let me tell you about it; listen closely…”

---

The Mother Grove sported the same lunette style ceilings and free flowing architecture as the two other ildsteds Arthur had already inhabited . But large alcoves, like church apses, decorated hallways, brimming to bursting with plant life of vines and ferns and recessed chromastones that provided the artificial lent it a different air altogether.

The gurgling of water from aesthetically pleasing fountains and brooks lining the passage provided a soothing ambient melody to accompany their wordless trudge. Whispering cloaks accompanied soft footfalls, barely more than audible upon the wooden floors. The staccato of a steel capped cane echoing through the hallway was the only sign that their group transversed the passage before the individual at the head broke the silence.

“You’re not long on the Path, young sprite,” their escort drawled. Arthur was beginning to think that what set apart the sylvani in terms of age was the timbre of their voices; older sylvani generally lost the tenor and tended towards rich baritones. On the other hand, sylvmaidens seemed even harder to place; either way, it was rude to nose around a lady’s age.

“Despite the fact, your burgeoning path has begun to bear its fruits. I was inclined to believe it is not a matter of what is seen but rather what is unseen.”

“If I understand you correctly, you say my Class is too low a level for the amount of proficiency I have shown in my craft―?” Arthur said, following right behind him.and therefore there is an intervening factor I am not aware of?”

Nora and Szephia flanked him left and right respectively.

“Astute—” the elder sylvani remarked. The less trafficked hallways of the Mother Grove were labyrinthine but seemed as though they always intuited where they were going, and shifted to mirror their destination.

“Whether we act with or without Intent , we use mana and, regardless of how miniscule the task, we impress our existence upon the World through our experiences just like a crafter would leave part of themselves in their workings. The World's bestowal of archetypes we all know as classes is its recognition of these experiences.”

'Old men,’ Arthur shook his head. “Which means that there is a way to find out what exactly is responsible—”

“And therein lies the basis of the Essentia Chronicon. Quite the sharp one on your shoulders,” The sylvani hummed again. “ I can see why the Esteemed Elder was interested. Ah, here we are.” the sylvani said as they came to a stop at a not so ostentatious pair of doors. One door was married into the other via a half circle that held a keyhole too large to be practical.

The old sylvani extended their cane into the aperture and murmured a few words, and there was a click followed by a grinding noise as the mechanisms in the door turned.

The doors slid into recesses in the sides to reveal the room beyond. A clap of their guide’s hands brought the ambient lighting to comfortable levels, revealing another dome shaped room. And Arthur thought he’d seen them all―

The workfloor circumvented the room like a walkway and had crescent shaped workstations with esoteric artifices. A few of them had glyphic tiles like the ones he’d encountered elsewhere while others seemed to be connected to a menagerie of alchemical setups in see-through crystalline equipment. The walls were made of tesselated panels, like the inside of a nuclear reactor.

On the other hand, the middle of the room was sunk lower by a number of concentric steps, four open bridges equidistantly connected to a hemispherical construct with the same tessellated faces as the walls. In the space between the bridges was fine black sand. All that said, Arthur did not know exactly what he was looking at. Nora voiced the question for him.

“And what is that supposed to be, Master Kolvar?” Nora inquired.

“That, dearest lass, is a Soul Scryer,” the [Runic Arboursmith] said. Arthur felt chills and gooseflesh ripple in his arms. The insinuation that there was such a thing that could read people’s souls opened up another can of worms.

“Is that really safe?” Arthur said, swallowing the quiver in his voice. He tried to project confidence as he looked around the place. It didn’t seem like it had seen frequent use; had the air been stale, he would have termed it deserted even.

“Ah―” Master Kolvar muttered, pulling at his beard. “This is the least used Soul Scryer young Arthur—do you know of the history behind the Soul Scryers?”

“I can't say I do—” Arthur said. “Should I?”

“Hmm,”the sylvani's grey eyes bored into him as if weighing the veracity of truth. Szephia took that moment to speak up.

“Old sprout get on with it will you?—we would sooner grow roots with all this waiting,” Szephia called out.

The crafter sniffed mumbling something about youngsters and tact as he strutted to the nearest standing artifice. Letting his cane lean on the side, he began passing his hands over the glyphic tiles, and they lit up as though they were gesture sensitive.

“Regardless, before you go in, I at least owe you the benefit of the doubt,” Kolvar said as the artifices hummed with magic. Long used workings and contraptions came alive, not excluding the concentric rings in the depressed middle floor. Lines of runework coruscated along the four bridges placed radially to the half sunken installation in the middle of the room. The black sand remained inert for the most part.

“What you see in front of you is the precursor to inspection magic left over from our Illvari forefathers. Did I ever tell you their legends?”

“You might want to make your way into the Soul Scryer; he is wont to go off on tangents once he begins ,” Szephia warned as she motioned towards a dilating aperture in the middle installation. An opening had appeared on its crystalline surface to reveal the space therein

Nora received Arthur’s cloak and rings leaving him with a light tunic and trousers that would not interfere with the exercise, as though he were getting an MRI scan. Walking towards the middle, he continued to listen to the crafter’s narration echoing through the chamber. Every step that brought him to the epicentre of the artifice was filled with anxiety; Arthur swallowed as a cold sweat trickled down the small of his back

“It is said, in the years that would later come to be known as the Fall, our forefather’s thought some sort of sickness had fallen among their people,” his tone became a sombre reflection of a sylvani who’d delved into the past of his ancestors. By then, Arthur had stepped into the aperture.

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A closer glimpse revealed that it was in fact spherical and not half a sphere as he’d supposed. The rest of it was buried a level lower than the four bridges laid out around its circumference.

More concentric rings descended in radial steps towards the centre. At the core of it was a chaise with armrests carved from material that looked like white marble. As soon as he stepped past the threshold, the aperture closed soundlessly, plunging the interior into darkness.

Arthur started, but Kolvar’s voice was still distinct, as though he was there with him. Aetheroglyphic symbols suddenly lit up within, forming a tapestry of multihued lights that revolved around the sphere’s interior.

Seating himself, Arthur extended his fingers to the indentations on the armrests and positioned the rest of his limbs accordingly. The seat seemed to have been made for people of a stature larger than his which was understandable since the Soul Scryer was practically an Illvarian relic. Closing his eyes, Arthur exhaled as he waited for something to happen.

---

“Young Arthur?” Kolvar called out.

“I am still here,” Arthur started. He had no idea how much time had passed. Looking around in confusion, he found that sphere and its strobing aetheroglyphs lacked a sense of depth, like it had grown bigger than it seemed from the outside. The density of mana had also started to pick up to an almost suffocating presence.

“What exactly was this Fall I’ve been hearing about?” Arthur said, stamping down his nervousness and impending feeling of apeirophobia. The spinning aetheroglyphs picked up more speed becoming one uninterrupted wall of running lights. Arthur groaned as he squinted against the rising brightness.

“Why, of course…the Falling Era is what our predecessors called the waning of the Elder civilizations,” Master Kolvar continued, oblivious of Arthur’s predicament. “

It is alleged that the war against the Fiends in the era before that taxed the thaumosphere in some parts of Eryth; the mana density dropped in some areas while it became so dense as to become toxic in others. Wanton use of powerful artillery spells so they say―” Master Kolvar trailed off in a warble.

“Huh?” Arthur gawped. He didn’t think he'd caught that correctly. The hum inside the contraption had grown into an incessant drone. The chain of aetheroglyphs split up and canvassed the whole interior so much that Arthur had to scrunch his eyes closed from the flashing glare.

“I am inclined to think the two were not independent events,” Kolvar paused as if contemplating. “It all began with the first still-borns among the Illvari—” his voice became indistinct, as if he was suddenly speaking from far away, then there was an eerie stillness.

Arthur thought something had gone amiss, but no sooner had he thought that than he felt a warmth in his core that was building up at an alarming rate. Then he gasped soundlessly, feeling as though someone had punched him in the solar plexus and simultaneously dropped the ground from beneath his feet.

His eyes flew open as his hand went to his stomach but there was nothing to touch, for he had no body. He felt as though his eyes had always been wide open, and eerily, he thought he could see himself in third person. It was confusing, like having the sensation of walking through a dream where you were both an actor and an observer.

Before him went an endless void that was neither light nor dark in any sense of the word. There were no dimensions he could perceive. In fact, he felt as if neither time nor matter existed here. Interestingly, he did not panic; he had a feeling that he belonged there.

It was exactly as Szephia had told him the interstice would be. It was the boundary between the vast World and a person’s Essentia Chronicon. The interstice existed wholly within one’s psyche. Whether the psyche was part of the soul or not remained to be known; Arthur wasn’t knowledgeable in the metaphysical.

‘Right I have 30 heartbeats. Depending on the time dilation, they can be compressed on a one to one ratio or one to infinity. Better not test it,’ Arthur thought-whispered. His thoughts seemed to echo out loud. Coming into it, he knew he'd be a disembodied entity, but it was no less unsettling.

‘Creepy,’ he shuddered. His inside voice was exactly how he imagined it to be. Curiosity made him want to see if it could sound feminine given his disembodied state but he shook his nonexistent head in alarm. Szephia warned him about his thoughts wandering―

‘Right focus,’ Arthur mused, turning about the dimensionless void. He let himself settle; after all everything in the interstice was a matter of perspective and what he perceived simply was.

‘I am and so I exist,’ Arthur thought. ‘Never thought Descartes would come in handy.’

’Step one; create dimensions, reference points and objects. What should I make, a GUI desktop with icons?― or a HUD with floating windows and dial gauges as progress bars? An Avatar as a point of contact?

Pixel by boring pixel, Arthur’s interstice transformed from a depthless void to a space with definable dimensions, and he, too, became a floating silhouette of blue motes.

The focus of that exercise faded into existence between one render of reality and the next as what he’d come for appeared. It took the form of his conception, the compilation of his Essentia Chronicon, Chronicle of his Existence appeared in the form of floating screens.

Four task panes were the focus of his metaphysical interface which he called the desktop. The desktop was labelled [Essentia] and seemed to contain his main biodata. It had the name Arthur Sturmdrache followed by Arthur Wade O’reilly in strikethrough.

Laid out after that were other particulars like age, gender and other miscellaneous information like race. As he suspected, his race had changed to Human Variant (Evolving). There was also an annotation at the end that said Tier 2.

He filed that as something worth noting and turned to the rest of the desktop. The main task panes were stacked like browser tabs, with the bottommost labelled simply as [Chronicon]. Leaving that for last, his focus was on the three main windows, which had what he wanted. Arthur willed them to expand.

It might have taken an eternity or the blink of an eye as the ethereal windows were filled with everything he’d accumulated so far. The window for [Stormdragon’s Scion] was hemmed by an iridescent green border, while [Magitech Aercrafter] seemed to be made from electrum or its Erythean equivalent, argerum. There seemed to be a significance to the colours.

More than Classes, Skills and Spells, he saw the breakdown of their specifics. The progress bars he’d thought up on a whim seemed to be shaky as if they were unsure of their representative metrics.

That was a given. Arthur did not exactly expect discrete data, rather continuous data might have been more apt, changing over time according to external factors. That was because his progress was measured against an external sample size logged in the World.

What caught his attention, however, was the window with the Class [Lostworlder]. It stood out, a see-through pane with navy blue filigree borders of gold tracery like the ones in a printed circuit board.

The gold traces looked dim as though they were not powered on in contrast to the other windows for [Stormdragon’s Scion] and [Magitech Aercrafter] which seemed to be positively brim with energy.

‘So that is what it was,’ Arthur thought, cradling his metaphysical chin as he floated with his incorporeal legs folded beneath his avatar’s body . He went down the list of the skills on the other windows and compared their relative size with the latter.

‘Master Kolvar was right. But to think [Lost Worlder] had been a class all along just, with passive influence―wait level zero?’ If there had been air, one would have heard Arthur’s gasp.

‘[Inventory Chest] was a heritage derivative skill of [Lostworlder]?’ Arthur’s silhouette of motes threw up their hands.

‘That explains how easily I acquired Locus; tracks in nicely with the Nys’veran Theory of Affinity Acquisition and what Aeskyre told me. On Earth that would have been tantamount to Darwinism.’ Arthur mulled as he went down the list.

⌈ ⌉

[ Lostworlder Level 0 ]

[Inventory Chest]

[Rosetta Stone]

[Trauma Repression]

[Apprentice Armscrafting]

[ Intermediate Avionics]

[Intermediate Cooking]

[Intermediate Marksmanship]

[Intermediate Mechanics]

[Intermediate Programming]

[Expert Mathematics]

⌊ ⌋

The Nysveran Theory of Affinity Acquisition postulated that mages could acquire an affinity by prolonged exposure. The downside was that it was a risky gamble to try deliberate exposure to a dense concentration of a certain affinity; one could succumb to mana poisoning.

‘[Trauma Repression]?’ He sucked a breath, wondering what could have possibly caused it in the first place. Did he actually die and get a reroll?

‘Absurd!’ He shook off the thought.’ But wait, was that to blame for my amnesia?’

‘And what the hell is [Rosetta Stone]? He voiced, asking no one in particular. As if intuiting, the [Lost Worlder] window flashed one. A new task pane subsumed the larger to display more detail. Arthur sucked in another metaphorical breath.

『 [Rosetta Stone] —Level ∞ ; Untiered ∞;

The original granodiorite slab bore inscriptions of several languages and scripts, whose discernment led to the understanding of glyphic characters. This skill is heritage derivative to [Lost Worlder] and lends itself to mental acuity in learning and languages.

』

‘What in the blue!’Arthur’s mind whirled. Skills, unlike spells, were not only tiered but attached to a level of proficiency. For those skills not learned under a tutor, Basic and Intermediate could be used interchangeably to mean Novice and Apprentice.

The level merely represented the extent of proficiency and experience with the skill; it was not enough to just have a high tier skill. But to have a skill that was untiered at infinity? Arthur’s metaphysical eyes bugged out of their sockets.

‘What the frag? Unbelievable―’ he shook his head.

‘Next’ Arthur thought as his ethereal eyes wandered down; he froze for the second time

‘[ Intermediate Armscrafting]?’ Arthur baulked as his premonition came to pass. It was not the proficiency of the skill that befuddled him. That was, insofar as he was concerned, non-consequential to the fact that it was there at all.

He prodded the skill and it opened a new window.

『 [Apprentice Armscrafting] — Level 10; Tier I ;

To a student of hoplology, this would be commensurate with someone just starting out on their path. There is not much in the way of theory but a decent grasp on the mechanics of a weapon’s workings have been understood enough to [Deconstruct] and [Repair] basic armaments.

』

‘Of course’ Arthur thought, cradling his ethereal head of motes in frustration. ‘Beyond learning what makes guns work, I have no knowledge of how gunpowder is made.’ Arthur had majored in Chemistry and Physics before attending Aviation College but he had no idea of how to go about mixing nitroglycerin with whatever else made smokeless gunpowder.

‘ I bet even that alchemical gel they use for cannons is a trade secret... heh. I don’t even know how to go about making the rifling in a bore. I am not a [Arms-smith],’ Arthur sighed thought-shouting in exasperation. He winced when the sound carried into echoes as though he was shouting down a well.

‘ Frag…who said I need chemical reactions anyway? I’ve been using thaumic reactions just fine. Next, let me run over the other classes and then finish up with the Chronicon.’ Arthur thought. He didn’t have time to dwell on the ramifications as he was on a clock. For the next indiscernible period of time, he opened window after window of all his skills including his recent additions until his desktop was cluttered.

---

When he was done, he knew instinctively when to rouse. It felt like waking from a dream; like he’d gone to sleep and just woken up. Sensations came back to him, the feeling of having an actual flesh and blood body subsumed his being, and he remembered that he actually had to breathe.

Nora was waiting for him right outside the powered down Soul Scryer.

“Arthur,” Nora said, smilingly as she handed him his cloak. “ Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I think so,” Arthur replied, gazing up at the surrounding dais as he donned the cloak. He saw Master Kolvar working on another artifice. This one seemed to have alchemical equipment, black ink that had silver tinges sloshed inside a crystal drum as he slotted it to the artifice.

“Aye, best be making your way here young sprite…there is one more thing we’re yet to do.” Master Kolvar called out. The walkways were still powered with magic; there was one more thing to be done.

“Right…” Arthur said. Ultimately, he thought he had a better grasp on his abilities and was already evaluating his priorities. His mind was already clearing a path for the next projects before the next nundine of Sylvani time was over. He knew what sort of [Scion] he wanted to be when he stepped among his kind again.

‘My kind, heh. I am barely human.’ Arthur thought as he fell into step beside Nora.

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