Beacon from Beyond

Dei heard someone burst into the room after Iora fell backwards screaming, but he couldn’t find it in him to move his head or look.

He felt a shockwave pulse through him as he was pushed to the side, felt arms tear the rope away from him and wrap him in a tight hug, then a soothing warmth entered his body.

He felt his mind awaken slightly, but not enough, instead staying slack faced as he watched the situation unfold. Iora had done something to him to give him the ability to understand those around him, so he heard his father scream at Iora, before his mother took off down the street while holding him.

He didn’t quite process anything until a shadow jumped out at his mother while she ran down an alley, and he heard a quiet gasp from her. Despite the damaged soul, something in him whispered a concern, and he forced himself to act.

‘Darkness magic. Maybe infrared light will destroy it?’ he thought quickly, then activated his racial trait for [Darkvision], pouring as much mana as he could into it.

The darkness evaporated under his gaze, and he immediately fell back into his stupor. Any time he would see a shadow, knowing that his [Darkvision] would already see through all the regular ones, he would hit it with infrared light until it was gone.

By the time he stopped seeing shadows, his eyes hurt and he wanted to sleep, but he couldn’t yet until he and mom were safe.

He watched the events with his mom take place as she escaped their pursuers, occasionally teleporting them a short distance somehow.

She managed to break through the stone wall and it disappeared, then as they ran down the tunnels. His mom didn’t stop or slow down for a long time.

Over the next week and a half, measured by how often his mom went to sleep, they continued to move downward at a rapid pace. Occasionally he would still himself if he saw some monster passing by, and tell his mom if he felt she didn't see it. She also started talking to him during the trip, and he heard her words, but the damage to him quieted all the motivation he had to talk, even if he knew he would be able to at this point. He just felt so hopeless.

Eventually, they reached a crack in the side of a cave, and his mom pushed through, only to come out to the smallest, most friendly looking cave he had ever seen. It was bright, those glowing stones all around them providing ample light, there were a few insects crawling all over the lush green grass, and some dark green moss that served to bad the walls. There was an indent near the back wall, serving as a perfectly human shaped bed. In another corner, there was a small stream of water running down some of the squishy moss; It drained quickly somewhere he couldn’t see, but the tiny bit of water would be incredible if they ran out of what they had in storage.

‘It's beautiful’ he thought while looking around the place. His mother placed him on the ground in front of her as his head swiveled, looking at everything around him, until he heard her say his name.

“Dei” she whispered to him, and he looked at her. It felt like she had been treating him so much more carefully these past few days, almost afraid that he could break at any moment. ‘She isn't wrong.’

“Dei, I love you. I don’t know what Iora did to you, but I will always love you. Do you know that?” She said to him, watching him closely.

When Iora was torturing him, Dei had felt hopeless. He thought his own mother had betrayed him, that she didn't love him anymore. He had felt so very alone, and in the last few weeks the feeling of loneliness only grew.

In the back of his head, he thought she would leave him as soon as she heard what Iora said. He thought she wouldn’t believe him, and that his heart was going to break all over again. He realized that he hadn’t spoken in the last few weeks because he was preparing himself to be alone again, as alone as he felt in that dark room Iora had forced him into. He didn’t want to get close to someone, only to have them betray him again. He had been betrayed so many times in his past life, and now he felt like it was following him here.

But he still wanted to believe her. Even if she might not accept him when Iora told her about all the things she found in his head, he couldn’t just stop himself from loving his mom. Tears welled up in his eyes before he burst into tears, holding his arms up for his mom to hold him.

‘I don't want you to go! I don’t want you to leave me!’ he cried out in his head as she pulled him into a hug. A feeling of absolute safety washed over him, and he knew that she really would always love him. No matter what Iora said to her, Dei knew that his mother would love him nonetheless, and he cried harder at the realization.

***

Over the next few days, his mother would talk to him frequently, telling him about the world around him. He found out that there was a surface world where the majority of humans lived, and that [Gem Dwellers] were not usually what they looked like. Supposedly, there was some war going on, but she skipped over it because she deemed it unnecessary to tell him about that. He realized pretty quickly that she caught on to his intelligence, and she already knew he could understand her.

He found out that there were many more races too, like the typical Dwarves and Elves, but there were things he’d never heard of either. One such example was another cave-dwelling race called Crawlers that sounded like mammals who were good at climbing stone. She told him stories of dragons and the knights that slayed them, and about Shamans. Shamans were the village heads, and their guardians. She said that they underwent harsh training, then were each granted an incredible artifact called their Shaman staff. Each staff was made from the soul of a former Shaman who fell in battle, and they were supposedly impossible to use by anyone who wasn’t the staffs owner. She told him stories from all ranges of life, and he listened with rapt attention the entire time, knowing that the magic she described was as real as he was.

She told him about how his father was a very strong man, and that it was remarkable that he had been able to stop the Shaman from following them using his own abilities in a one-on-one fight.

His mom also told him about his siblings. Rena was his older sister, and Ben was his older brother. He found it a little funny that Ben was a name which had carried over from his previous life, but he didn’t say that. She said she was excited to go back home with him and have them all hunt together.

Each time she would hug him, he felt an incredible sense of security emanating from her. He realized that she was pushing some sort of mana into him from her body, and this mana was going about his soul and rushing into the cracks. He didn’t know where it went, only that it disappeared in the scars that were left from Iora.

That was another thing, the stitches that held his soul together very clearly did not heal it. It was up to him and his natural ability to heal in order to repair the soul damage that had been caused. The stitches also did not stay within his soul, very clearly manifesting across his skin as glowing white lines that kind of reminded him of pictures he’d seen of people being struck by lightning.

When his mom pushed her mana into him though, he saw as a pink mana, very close in shade to Kindness yet slightly darker, swirled around his soul and entered the cracks that were left behind.

He didn’t know where the mana was going, or what it did, but he knew that it was helping him. Each time she gave him a burst of mana, he would wake up more and more from the stupor he had been forced into. ‘Iora didn’t just deal lethal soul damage, she shattered my soul with a metaphorical hammer. Broke it into a million little bits, and now I'm putting the pieces back together.’

Technically, they were all in place, yet it just didn’t feel… right. He felt so incredibly violated, and he shuddered every single time he remembered her face. He frequently searched his soul for any trace she still had any sort of hold over him, but never found anything. He did find some sort of packet of information that had been artificially implanted into him, and it gave him all the information he would ever need on the language his mom and the others in the town spoke, so that explained how he was now able to understand them now.

He still hadn’t looked at his interface or notifications yet. He never did when he was dealt soul damage, and at this point he was beginning to suspect it was some sort of compulsion. Did the System not want people to make important decisions while their mental states were damaged in some way? He wasn't sure, but he decided to listen to it now, and waited until he was thinking clearly again.

He kept track of time by the dimming and brightening of the gemstones, as he realized that they indicated night and day. After three days of listening to his mom talk to him about all the cool adventures she had when she was younger, or all the people she met, he finally felt good enough to ask her a question that had been plaguing him for a while.

“Mama?” he said when she reached a lull in the topic she was talking to him about. She looked at him with surprise, then smiled widely at him, asking

“Yes honey?”

“How do people know when to do things? Like when they are supposed to get up or when they are supposed to leave the town to go hunt?”

She had been telling him about all sorts of things, but he never caught how everyone functioned on the same time. It felt like there was some sort of clock he didn’t have access to, and he was right.

“Oh!” she said to him “you can set a timer using your Interface. A long time ago, some people set up a special timer that broke the seasons down into twelve months, each one being thirty days, each day being twenty six hours, each hour sixty minutes, and each minute sixty seconds.” she said, and he realized there was some sort of calendar.

“How do I do that? How do I make the timer?” he asked.

“Well, you meet someone who has the timer on their interface, and they can send it to you. Here.” she said, and he felt a notification go off in his mind. He still didn’t want to read everything else, but he’d look at the timer.

[Since the Fall: 13/4/809 - 14:55:32]

He stared at it for a few seconds, and something bothered him. It was day/month/year, then it showed how many hours it had been since midnight. He didn’t mind the military time, but the American in him yearned for the month/day/year that he used to have in his previous life, so he tried to see if he could change it, and succeeded.

[Since the Fall: 4/13/809 - 14:55:46]

He smiled. ‘Nice.’

It was weird that it still mostly functioned on the same time System as his old world, such as twelve months in a year and sixty minutes in an hour. The months he could understand being the same, as it was really just marking the passing of seasons broken down. The matching minutes were something else, and he had a few guesses as to what it was. One such theory was that when this System and his home System shared information, some processes were standardized between them, and that echoed across their sectors. Another theory was some sort of instinctual knowledge between souls when they crossed universes that, even if forgotten, pushed them into a particular direction when it came to their advancement.

He didn’t know, but the similarities made the entire thing a lot easier. He wouldn’t convert it to AM/PM though, as even thinking about having “thirteen o’clock” made him scrunch his face up.

He asked what “Since the Fall” meant, but his mom said that she didn’t know, just that the timer started at that event. Supposedly, hundreds of years ago, their Gods had come down and told everyone to mark the day and what to call it. Since then, it’s been used to mark time ‘Cool, a mystery!’ he thought happily.

He had her attention to ask more questions, so he did. He asked what an affinity was, and what it meant to raise it. She looked alarmed at the question, but answered it anyway.

“Affinities, in the Interface, measure your connection to a Conceptual Plane, places where we draw power from. The more you raise the affinity, the more power you can draw from the plane it comes from. It becomes easier to make Skills with a stronger connection also, and the Skills can tap on deeper concepts. Do you have any affinities Dei?” She asked the last part with an excited look in her eyes.

He didn’t understand the talk of conceptual stuff at all. He also didn’t see a reason to lie to her, at least not a lot, so he responded with “Um, yes. I have a Kindness affinity at Rare, a Wrath affinity at Uncommon, and a Soul affinity at Common. What do-” he started to ask but his mom picked him up in a hug and started squealing while jostling him around a lot.

“My boy! Born with three affinities, and one is a Rare! Im so proud!” she told him, making him blush.

“Thank you.” he squeaked out, and his mom pinched his cheek.

“Alright, what was the next question?” she urged him to continue, the grin never leaving her face.

“Well, what do you mean a Conceptual Plane? Iora… cast a spell on me so I could understand her, so I know what those words mean, but is it a place? Could I go there?”

“Well, Conceptual Planes only sort-of exist. They are like ghosts, intangible yet real.” she said casually, but his eyes widened at the revelation that ghosts were real. He didn’t say anything though, and she continued. “People have visited Conceptual Planes before, it's actually very common. Not necessarily to go there, but more to visit. There is this thing that happens sometimes, called a Convergence.

“When a convergence happens. A Conceptual Plane will intersect with reality.” she said, knitting her fingers together in front of her. “The concepts manifest as monsters, and the area is flooded with the mana of the concept. Do you remember that red forest back home?”

He nodded, so she said “Well, at the center of that forest was a Convergence. It intersected with the Conceptual Plane of Wilderness, and that plane spilled over into the rest of the cavern. I won't try to describe what the Conceptual Planes are like, as I’ve never been to one directly and I heard it's difficult to understand, but Convergences turn them into real places you can walk into." She paused for a moment to let him gather himself.

Basically, they didn’t physically exist until they manifested themselves in reality, then people could walk around in them.

“Do they stay around forever? Or does it go away after a while? If its only sort-of real, does it hurt to walk around in them?”

She smiled at his questions, probably amused that something she considered basic information was so foreign to him. “They always have something called an Anchor. Anchors are physical objects that have a massive amount of… concepts imbued into them. Basically for the one back home, it could perhaps be some sort of seed that has the concept of Forest or Plant inside of it. Each one is very magical, and highly sought after, as they can have special effects. For example, the Wilderness Anchor back home might make all plants within a hundred feet of it grow faster.

“To answer your question, if someone moves the anchor at all, then the Convergence ends. Back home, nobody ever tried to get rid of the Wilderness Convergence, as it made the plants grow faster and was a useful part of the community.

“As for whether it hurts, it can be harmful to stay a long time in a Convergence. The concepts in the area will try to turn you into a part of it. It doesn’t hurt if it's something that's supposed to happen though, such as if you walked into a Convergence of Kindness. Instead of hurting you or changing you, it would strengthen your Kindness affinity the longer you stayed in it, up to a certain point. People use them to learn affinities, but that can be incredibly dangerous.”

He looked at her questioningly, so she elaborated.

“Not everyone is meant to learn an affinity. Its impossible to naturally form a connection to an affinity that you aren't meant for. For example, someone who hates people wouldn’t be able to learn the Kindness affinity. If you force it by using a Convergence, it will change your personality a lot. Its better to learn affinities naturally, then strengthen them using convergences, as you’ve already proven that its a part of who you are.”

His head was spinning with all the information, but his imagination was running wild. He could find an area with a bunch of magic and monsters, then if he made it to the center, he could find an awesome treasure? That sounded incredible! Like a real adventure! Dangerous, yes, but it sounded like a story.

Something was bugging him though, that she kept using the word ‘concepts’ to describe certain things. It would be nice to have some clarification on that.

“Mama, what are concepts? You said that there were deep concepts too, what are those?”

She looked off into space as she tried to think about her response. “Concepts are… hard to describe. They’re like pieces of an affinity, smaller bits. An affinity for Fire could have the concept of Campfire, for example. A deep concept would be something Fire represents, but is hard to grasp. The most famous deep concept for fire is Dragonfire. Its known to be very potent for some reason, but I'm not sure why. You could easily understand what a campfire is, so it wouldn’t be a deep concept, but what makes Dragonfire special? It’s not as easy to understand.”

That was more or less what he expected, but he wouldn’t have put it so eloquently, so he was glad she had described it well.

“Dei, be careful with your Soul affinity” she said, and he looked back up at her, seeing worry in her eyes. “It's not something humans usually have, and we aren’t necessarily supposed to have it. People who are born with it or learn it naturally are always those who enjoy spending time alone, but since it's not a natural human affinity, it's going to affect you as it grows. Soul affinities are known to make people hermits. Not necessarily bad, but you wont like spending time around others. Could you promise me that you’ll still come to visit me when you grow up? Even if you really don't want to?” she asked him.

He smiled at her and nodded his head. “Of course mama! I’ll always want to visit you, so I will!” he said happily. He meant it too. In his previous life, he made sure to always call and spend time with his parents, and he would cherish the time he had with her. Lives were too short to not spend them loving the people around him.

She smiled back at him, and pulled him into another hug.

***

A week passed since his mom had taken them both to this little cave. It was a bit lonely, but for some reason, that didn’t bother him as much as it should’ve. His mom told him that some members of the Council would be arriving in their village soon, and they would get the situation sorted out.

She said that the Council was the ten most powerful and wise Shamans in the entire underground network where all the [Gem Dweller] variant humans lived, and that they were called on when the local Shaman was either not enough to handle the situation, or if the local Shaman had for some reason become corrupt.

There was a sort of capital in the underground, a town where the Shamanic Council members lived, that was placed right in the center of all the other settlements, that way they could reach any town equally quickly. His mom told him that their village was actually one of the frontier villages, and that it was one of the deepest in the entire network.

He thought it was weird that she didn’t use the term “country” to describe the entire system, because there was a word for that in their language, but he was already learning so much about the world that he didn’t have the time to ask about it before they had fluttered to the next topic, and he was happy to just keep listening.

His mother continued to pour mana into him. He wasn’t good at estimating the amount, but she had to have given him tens of thousands at this point, perhaps even hundreds if thousands, and a slight pink glow emanated from the cracks deep within his soul when he went to check on them with his soul sight.

The glow across his body stayed white, but something within the core of his soul drank hungrily of the extra mana being given. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked like the cracks were beginning to mend too.

The feeling of security his mothers hugs gave him stayed for longer each time.

At first, he thought it was just because he was getting better psychologically, and the sense of vulnerability Iora inflicted on him was beginning to fade. He had been tortured before he was even a year old, that was going to stay with him for as long as he lived.

But now, seeing the slight pink glow emanating from deep within the cracks of his soul, he thought his mother might actually be infusing him with her love somehow. It made little sense, but in a world with magic, anything was possible, right?

***

The day after though, something sudden and horrible changed. His mother quickly stood up and a look of seriousness overtook her previous smile.

The look of seriousness dropped from it a second later as she paled significantly and let out a gasp. She saw something he couldn’t see, or felt something he couldn’t feel.

She turned towards Dei, and he saw a glossy look in her eyes as she knelt down to his height.

“Dei, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I-” she choked on her own words as the tears finally spilled down her cheeks and onto the ground. ‘What? Whats happening?’ he started to hyperventilate, panicking at her own outburst of emotions

“I need to leave. I need to leave, and I’m not going to be able to come back. I’m sorry.” she pulled him into a hug and let out a shuddering breath. He hardly had time to process anything before she turned around and strided towards the exit

‘No! She can’t leave! Didn’t she say we would go back home together? Didn’t she tell me she wouldn’t abandon me?!’ He screamed in his head as the one person he thought would always love him betrayed him.

But he knew that wasn't true. His mother would never abandon him. He knew it, deep within his heart, that she would always do what she thought was best for him. If she was leaving him here, if she said she couldn’t stay with him, it would be for his own sake.

He was hurting right now, but he felt her resolution to never give up on him every single time she had given him a hug. He knew that for her, a decision to abandon him would be torturous. To abandon him would be the hardest decision she had to make, and if she was doing so, it could only mean that it was the very last option.

He didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t know why she had to leave, but he suspected Iora was coming, and that his mom didn’t want her to catch him.

The situation wasn’t resolved. She said the Council would stop Iora, but what if it was the opposite? What if they agreed that he needed to die? It was the only thing he could think of. His mother was leaving him because she would rather face off against the Shamans than to give him up.

He needed to let her know.

“Mama!” he called out to her just before she left, and she paused for a moment.

“I love you” was all he could say before the burning in his throat took his voice. He wanted to say more, to say he knew what was happening and that he would find a way to survive and make it back to her, but he couldn’t. He’d already said everything he needed her to know, everything he felt.

“I love you too, baby” she said, before pushing herself out of the cave as quickly as she could, even cutting herself on the walls covered in sharp stones to get out faster.

When she was finally gone, he allowed himself to cry. Sobbing loudly in the small room, he wanted to call out for his mom, he wanted her to come back, to make everything better, to find a way for them to stay together until he grew up and left on his own.

He wanted to live his life, knowing the love she gave him. He just wanted her to hold him and tell him it would be okay.

But he knew. This was goodbye.