Chapter 193: 191 – Rule Thyself, Despot of Self

Some argued to give him a proper burial, to spite him by being better than him, whilst others wished to butcher him and display his head atop the lighthouse. Many, however, wished to burn him - to turn his own pleasure-ship into a floating funeral pyre, believing that this manner of destroying the body would placate the spirit and avert a curse.

Such a conclusion would, however, never come. While some of Rigport’s people celebrated and others raged against those few Pateirians who defied the Red Lady’s command of retreat, eyes turned from the splattered general.

In the morning of the next day, his remains and flying swords had both vanished, leaving nary a trace save a message cursing all those involved in his casting down, swearing vengeance against them, directly naming “the rabid war dog, the failed inquisitor, and the psychotic mutant whore”, writ large across the square in the pitch of his own curse. 

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Days passed, and Zelsys trained. Aspiring would-be disciples had begun showing up every once in a while, and each time, Zelsys had to turn them down, to tell them to return next week. It wasn’t time. Not yet.

She had considered the scroll time and time again, but even when she tried activating its magic, it only gave her an intense burst of stinging static through the arm alongside the sense that the time was not right just yet. Not until that night in the middle of which she awoke, feeling an inexorable drive to look within the scroll. 

The moment she did that, pulling apart its spools and impelling it to action with a mental command, her vision faded out and she once more fell into a deep sleep. From Zel’s perspective, however, there was no gap in consciousness - as far as she knew, she’d been instantaneously transported.

Zelsys found herself in a desert at night, stretching as far as the eye could see, the cold winds biting at her without cease while the sand burned underfoot.

A floating citadel shone in the heavens to the north-west, and upon the wind, a faint, male voice was carried, speaking foreign words, yet resounding crystal-clear as a bell in her mind: “An endless sea, an endless desert, an endless labyrinthine ruin. The Otherworld takes whatsoever shape it is bestowed… And so does the Primordial Self.”

Then, suddenly, her surroundings were flooded by a silver glow from behind her, and when she turned her head, she saw that an impossibly large moon had risen into the night sky. It dominated the skyline, drowning everything… And her shadow was coming from the wrong direction.

Despite the position of the moon, her shadow stretched towards it as if a light source had rapidly moved to be directly behind her. It flowed like boiling pitch across the sand, twisting and distorting into a familiar silhouette.

It was that thing. 

The dream-doppelganger, with its body partly covered by mangy fur, its primal vulgarity on full display, its face masked by a bear’s skull and brow crowned by antlers, the left one resembling briars whilst the other hearkened to gnarled knotty branches. Rusty-red dreadlocks spread out behind it like a cloak of snakes and matted, silver hair curtained its face, the singular metallic strand glimmering in the moonlight. Glowing eyes stared back at her from the skull’s sockets, flashing a familiar silver.

From the silhouette of her shadow it rose up into three dimensions. Even sanding hunched over it still towered over her, its clawed, overlong arms hanging limply in front of it as jets of steamy breath erupted from its nostrils.

The voice again. 

“Of all the branches upon the path, you’ve stepped onto the shortest and most perilous… Just as I once did. You’ve grasped the reins of rule by force, as I once did. When you wake you will have cemented your worthiness to rule, or you will have been cast down.”

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“In this place between places, internal conflict may be resolved by direct means, inner demons may be battled with blades of condensed will, but the laws of the material need not apply.” 

“Rule thyself, Despot of Self… But know that a house divided will not stand. The Primordial Self must acquiesce of its own will.”

There was no point to fighting herself, that was a foregone conclusion…

...But this was not herself. It was her Primordial Self, the instinctive animal that served as the coals to fuel the complex, self-correcting engine of sapient thought and raw instinct.

It had no inherent understanding of speech, she could not talk it into working alongside her.

Still, she thought to at least make a token effort: “You don’t understand speech, do you.”

The Primordial Self froze for a moment, tilting its head in confusion. 

“Thought as much…” she sighed inwardly, but here, her inner monologue resounded aloud.

Moderating her instincts was something she’d done for as long as she’d been awake, having ever relied upon them for snap decisions, but needing to remain in control for more tactical choices. It was a constant ebb and flow that she just did without thinking about it, trading clarity for viciousness and vice versa. Oftentimes she needn’t suppress her instincts at all, merely steering that unfettered energy towards the right thing.

Again and again, her mind strayed to the analogy of a great engine. She constantly needed to adjust the fuel mixture, the gear, to route the metaphorical steam towards the correct machinery, from movement to attacking to dodging. 

The Primordial Self did, indeed, speak no tongue of man, for such understanding was the dominion of the higher mind, of Man…

...But beyond the tongues of man there were others, ones which the savage realms of nature spoke in, and Zelsys had been fluent in one of the two dominant universal tongues since she had emerged from a womb of glyph-glass.

Violence.

Through violence, she could communicate that the Primordial Self would be better off if it relinquished control willingly rather than grabbing at the reins whenever it thought its own primal judgment wiser.

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