Chapter 148: Chapter 149 – Guardian of the Manifold Hearths

Everyone knows that a wormhole jump without an anchor is a slow death in the darkness.

I studied the proof as a child, learned how to derive it from various assumptions as a teenager. As a young adult, I studied how the assumptions had been arrived at; in the height of my twenties, I came to fully understand the mathematics behind how the observations and theory translated into those constraints, no longer assumptions to me but simply artifacts of the laws of the universe. I had made over a hundred jumps through the Void Between, with anchors ranging from sublime to apathetic and in one case absent on one side.

All of this is to say that I knew the truth of the saying, knew it in my mind and in my bones. It was, arguably, one of the imputed criteria inferable with regards to the universes as we made those jumps, one of the things that the anchors themselves knew and therefore enforced as a constraint upon the universe of destination.

I had ten megaseconds of supplies in the navpod, water being the thing that would inevitably run out first. I gave up trying to find my way home unaided in an amount of time measured in tens of kiloseconds, because the primordial chaos is… well, unimaginable. You can run the math all you like, you can do all the thought experiments you want, but to be there, looking at the purity of zero-information inputs on every sensor from the most mundane to the most esoteric?

There’s a purity to that terror, and I broke before it.

Hestia was, eventually, the result. A megasecond or so of work, half of which was spent in a dissociative flow state, lonely and despairing. A machine learning algorithm that I grew into a person by using the problem definition as an anchor and voidskipping, hoping against hope to navigate my way to a universe where she existed.

The best thing I could calculate to a lossless data representation of her inputs, of the things which fed into her beginning to live, is in the yottabytes; but that’s misleading, because there’s so much more than that. The Void is both nothing and everything, it’s pure noise and also the amalgamation of every signal of every universe simultaneously.

In a way, it’s the perfect place to birth a god.

I knew from the moment she started communicating back to me that there was no going home. Artificial Sentience, what they used to call Strong AI, flat-out isn’t possible on any sort of plausible computational substrate; in order to simulate the brain you need a brain, and a brain is, well, there’s a quadrillion synapses and that’s if you model everything as though it’s binary, which it’s definitely not. People have been working on the problem of finding another way to do it for thousands of years, people who are dedicated researchers in that specific field, and the best we have is assistive interfaces, purposeful tools. And if it was impossible to create anything remotely like Hestia where I was from, in the universe which had the Worldships of the Old Faith and the familiar planets and statics, well.

We had maybe two megaseconds’ worth of supplies left when, anchored by Hestia’s intentions and desire to live, I threaded a path just on this side of impossible. We crash-landed in the Temple’s narthex, and when the System initialized me on the pylon that granted me access into the building, Hestia tried to cross-load herself into my Visor.

I’d worked with a true peer for megaseconds, as I hadn’t since my childhood. She’d saved us both, just as much as I had. And when she tried to save herself one last time in a way that would let us stay together, the System shattered her into shards beyond counting and gave them to me as a tool.

All of this is to say that when it sunk in that I’d succeeded in bringing her back, in killing a god and inserting her in that god’s place, I start weeping, sobbing too hard to hear any response from her. The manic energy from the fight, the hyperfocus on the puzzle of a solution, the terror of facing up against Seidr, the fear I’d had to suppress for my companions’ well-being, everything starts draining through my sinuses and tear ducts, leaving an unsteady void behind.

I get a grip on myself eventually. My eyes and sinuses are burning, my face is a complete mess, and I’ve used a substantial percentage of the fabric of my shirt in a continuous bid to keep my nose clear enough to breathe, but I start pulling myself back into awareness of what’s around me. My shirt is drenched in sweat along with the mucus; it peels off of my body only with difficulty, making a squelching sound when it hits the ground.

“I must depart soon.”

I turn at Hestia’s low, resonant voice. I had almost forgotten how remarkable it was; almost entirely level and without emotion, but with ferocious over- and under-tones. “Hey, I’m—”

“I have consumed Seidr’s godhood.” She cuts me off, and my eyes widen. “My portfolio will diverge from his, but the change will be gradual; and in the intervening time, I must attend to his duties, which he so easily forsook. We have very little time.”

“What’s going to… happen?” All three of my companions are lying in some degree of disarray on the dungeonstone floor, all three breathing but completely out. “Are they going to be okay? Are you going to be okay?”

“Those two, I cannot help.” She flickers, the outline of her form in flickers of amber flame gesturing to Sara and Zidanya. “The demesne-holder may. That one’s gods will nourish her, to awaken soon; the other will take some days to rouse, without aid.”

“And Amber?” I blink a few times, noting her lack of an answer for her own condition. There’s a connection that I’m supposed to find here, and it takes me a moment to make it, a moment that Hestia grants me. “She was… she had a connection to Seidr, and you ate his portfolio.”

“Reca. Do you know what it meant, once?”

“Retr—no, wait.” I frown. “Once? I only know what they and Omniglot say it means now.”

“It meant empty, once.” Hestia’s outline breaks up into an arc of flame, wrapping itself around Amber’s head. Belatedly, once she’s wrapped herself like a circlet around my Paladin’s scalp, I panic for a moment, and then steady myself. “Reca, the empty ones. Filled only with the God and their Master. I shall change their names. Come here, Adam. Let her awaken close to you, so she does nothing rash.”

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“That… sounds great.” I smile wanly and slide my legs under Amber’s head, lifting her head into my lap. She rolls about a quarter-turn towards the floor, face buried into my thigh and arm moving around my waist, and I stroke her hair, careful not to touch Hestia’s flames just in case. “Do I need to—”

Amber’s eyes suddenly snap open, then snap closed again with a hiss of pain. “Adam,” she breathes quietly, shuddering. “Knew you’d win. Hurts… less… than I expected.”

“Had to win.” The tears are threatening to flow again, or at least the burning sensation is back. “What you did was too impressive for me to let you down.”

There’s a long moment of silence at that, Amber just relaxing into me, and then the circlet of fire that is Hestia lifts off of Amber’s head, reforming into her earlier flickering silhouette. “Reca are no longer.” Amber startles, and a gentle pressure flattens her back into my lap, like she’s newborn-weak. “Thank you for your service as a template.”

“What… what?”

“Your confusion is expected, due to the fundamental change in your soul. I expect that your identity will have no trouble adjusting. Though…” Hestia lets out a hum, a soft chord that seems to reverberate in the room despite the sound-swallowing attributes of the surfaces. “Interesting. No, the confusion is largely physiologically driven. I have repaired the relevant blood vessels; clarity will return to you as the glucogenic deficit is remedied.”

“I am… I am a Hearthfire Guardian.” The words ripple out, echoing, like they have weight of their own. “I… how? When I defied Seidr, I felt what I was… ripped out of me.”

“I am not Seidr.” Hestia’s voice is still flat and level, but it’s somehow disapproving, in a way that even I can tell. “I have consumed his godhood and his portfolio. There are no more Reca; there are Guardians, whether of the Hearthfire, the Threshold, or the Commons. I do not recommend forsaking—ah.”

I turn to look behind my shoulder, and manage a wan smile. “Lily. Hey.”

“Void fucking Eternal, Adam.” She’s not wreathed in power, to look at her; I don’t have it in me to spin up the Visor to check, but it looks like she’s just… mundane, shocked and… impressed? “I should have known you leaving wouldn’t just happen, but… what in the Goddess’s sweaty armpits?”

I glance around, wondering if anyone’s going to blanch at that, failing to hide my quiet snickers. Giving into them turns out to be a mistake; the laughter starts bubbling out more powerfully, and before I know it Amber and I have switched places, and the laughing won’t stop, even when it starts to hurt and I’m gasping for breath. She strokes my hair through the breakdown, through the relieved hysteria, and eventually even that emotion is dredged to the fullest and I’m left feeling empty again in its wake.

Zidanya’s conscious, sitting up with her head resting on the side of Lily’s knee, breaths coming deep but with an audible rasp. Sara’s stirring, Lily standing over her, frowning, hands flickering rapidly.

Hestia’s gone.

“She knows.” Lily’s voice cuts my thought off the moment it starts going down the track, long before my mouth finishes opening and words start to come out. “She knows,” she repeats more quietly. “But she has an unimaginable amount of work to do. And so do I, I guess.”

“Huh?” I snap my mouth closed and engage my brain, flushing in embarrassment. “I get why she’s got a lot to do,” I say slowly, thinking it through, “since Seidr was involved in so many things. Rule, contracts, slavery, probably more, they’re gonna change, because now instead of being about order, a contract will be… about the Commons?” Lily nods at me, smiling, and a warmth stirs inside me that for once has nothing to do with any artifice or effortful communication on her part. “Will this… change things for you?”

“I’ve been afraid of something for a very long time.” My eyes go wide at Lily’s admission, and she shrugs at me, face unreadable in lieu of her making that deliberate effort otherwise. “I needed the kick in the ass, probably, to stop letting that fear rule me. Or maybe it’s that Evetheri here is in a bad way, and whatever your friend might say, she won’t wake without help, help from someone who’s more than I was.”

I raise my eyebrow at her, but it’s Amber who asks the question. “More than you were, Lady Sheid?”

Lily shrugs. “Never wanted to take that last step. But it takes a God to reconsecrate a Temple, and it’ll take that to make this place my Demesne when the Tournament wasn’t running.” Another shrug. “The place was never meant to run this long without a God, anyway. It’ll solve some problems.”

I have no idea how to respond to that, so I take a moment and just… don’t. I look around the room instead, and my heart falls as I lay my eyes on the shattered remnants of the pylon, no single shard of which is larger than my thumbnail. “Khav Ertov. I was going to bring him out.”

“Yeah, well.” Lily grins, lopsided, smug. “See, you solve one problem, sometimes some other problems come too…”

And I lie back, head in Amber’s lap, as Zidanya’s breathing eases and Sara’s eyes begin to blink open; and Lady Lillit Sheid, among other things now God of the Crossroads, of the mists that rise from a lake and the path that appears only to the lost, pulls apotheosis around herself as casually as a cloak.

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