Scientific Sorcery : Beware of Kittens!

The cavern shook violently as Bobliss's fists pounded against the desolate island above us. Chunks of basalt rained down, shattering on the cavern floor. The sound of his fists or perhaps blood hammer pounding at the rock was intense, like endless thunder multiplied tenfold.

"Come out, come out and play with me, little Stillwalker!" Bobliss's voice vibrated across the air, water and rocks. "I'll tear this entire island apart if I have to. It won't take me long to reach you and that cat familiar of yours!”

I grabbed Moonalia's arm, pulling her away from a falling stalactite. Stormy hissed, darting between the falling debris with feline grace.

"You think you can hide from me forever?" The Gygr’s Champion continued his rant. "I am the chosen hero of Christianna Freyja! Your petty tricks won't save you now! I'll find you wherever you go, be it beneath the earth or in the ocean! I won’t stop hunting you down because I cannot die, cannot be unmade by the likes of you!”

As the cavern continued to crumble around us, I saw a look of grim realization settle over Moonalia's features. Her yellow-gold eyes met mine.

"I... I think I understand now," she said, her voice barely audible over the din of destruction. "This was always going to be a one-way trip for me."

I opened my mouth to protest, but she held up a talon, silencing me.

"No, no. It's okay. I knew that coming here was incredibly dangerous," Moonalia continued. "The price of leaving the safety of the Nest had to be paid sooner or later. But this... this is my chance to do something truly meaningful. To be more than just a low level artificer!"

“But what about the island of sunshine?” I stammered. “What about the colony, making a Cantigeist for me and Stormy?!”

“Sometimes things don’t work out as we want them to.” She glanced up at the cracking ceiling, twitching from every booming impact of the Champion’s hammer above us, then looked back at me. "Ioan, if you don't send me into forever, that mad Champion up there will unmake me. I won't be able to fight, hide or run away from him. He will sense me wherever I go! Unlike you, I radiate magic, disrupt the Aether wherever I am. We don't have any other choice."

I shook my head, unwilling to accept her sacrifice. "Mooni, there has to be another way. We can-"

"I can smell your fear, Stillwalker!" Bobliss taunted. "It won't be long now! Oh I’ll make you pay for what you’ve done to my Christianna! The cries of your familiar will soothe my aching, hollow heart! I’ll snap the neck of that birdkin abomination that came to your side before I feast on your flesh!”

"There isn't time!" Mooni cried, her feathers ruffling with urgency. "You must hold onto me, activate the artifact and sacrifice a piece of yourself! Are you not listening to his words? He will break my neck and eat you if we don’t activate the power of the Builders of Endalaus! Do you have some secret technique to stop an Immortal?”

I thought about Teya, thinking about how Cali died last time we tried to stop Bobliss.

Last time the Immovable man took his time and was just playing with us like a cat would with a mouse. This time–this time it sounded like he was determined to kill me, Stormy and Moonalia.

“I can’t just…” I snarled, trying to think of something, of anything.

“You can,” Mooni affirmed. “Yes. You can. I believe in you, my gem. Just… we can optimize this… maybe… I don’t exactly know how though… If I just had more time, more insight then maybe I could…”

“Optimize what?” I winced as a rock slammed into my ferronite and witchglass armor-covered shoulder, flying off to the side.

Bobliss's laughter grew louder, more maniacal.

“Thank you for… everything, thank you for letting me hold your hand, for listening to me for the past ten days over the voicecast, for understanding me unlike anyone else in the world, Ioan,” Moonalia whispered urgently, gold eyes glittering with sparks of tears.

As I looked at the crying Corvix, suddenly everything clicked into place.

The black snowflake, Teya's cracked megalith, Cali's lifeless body, Moonalia - they were all pieces of a grand puzzle I hadn't fully grasped until now. A puzzle that Stormy's feline future sense had been guiding me towards.

A solution, tips from my future self, telegraphed into the past with mostly binary answers to questions. Messages from myself to myself sent through the paw of one little black kitten!

Stormy led me to this moment. I led myself to this moment, letting myself discern results I haven't even considered, to confirm hypotheses that I haven't had time to test, to build things that I hadn't even fully understood in the present.

Everything mattered.

Everything everywhere at the same time was interconnected.

"Wait," I said, my mind igniting with an understanding. "Mooni, you're right. We can optimize this. We can save more than just you and me! We can save everyone, everything!”

The Corvix blinked at me.

Two spirals spinning in opposite directions.

A dead body with roots connected to the snowflake as its heart.

The bodiless Gygr suspended in the Astral Abyss, folded away completely, managing the whole equation.

A champion without a body part. The witch’s domain being an extension of their body, a crystalline strata that projects the witch into existence.

With a press of the remote, I liquefied the barrel containing Teya’s megalith.

"Teya," I called out as the river spirit’s megalith remnant bobbled out from the no longer solid barrel. "Can you hear me? Are you still there?"

Stormy meowed, and I saw the faintest flicker of Teya's watery Avatar materialize above her pillar shard.

"Mrrres," Stormy translated from the porch of the sleigh.

"We need your help," I said urgently. “I’m going to send your megalith into forever.”

“Mrrwatt?” Teya blinked at me.

Moonalia simply stared at the megalith and at Teya’s ghostly Avatar, beak open wide in shock. Then she rushed to the megalith and tapped her talons all over it, trying to understand exactly what Teya was.

“Projection,” the Corvix staccatoed rapidly. “Of course! An Astral projection of the highest order, one created, animated into existence by an ancient Builder artifact! A voice of the wild, of the ocean itself! This… this is revolutionary! A Cantigeist made not from Starfall but from a wholly other sort of strata! This will change…”

The pounding above ceased for a moment as Bobliss scooped out and threw obliterated basalt columns and rocks into the North Sea. Then it resumed once again, the Immovable man determined to reach his prize, to pry our bodies from the innards of the nameless island.

“I figured it out!” Mooni suddenly fluttered looking between me and the river goddess. “I figured it all out! Ioan! You are a projection of all of these rocks, of everything crystalline in this cavern and in that sleigh! You’re the incredible result of P-Geistgrain crystalline matrices within the earth, rocks and your armour and backpack! You're stable crystals interacting with fluid crystals comprising your entire N-Geistgrain self!”

“Sounds about right,” I said. “That’s pretty much what my own conclusion about myself was.”

Mooni nodded, the edges of her beak spread upwards in a smile. “You’ve got a plan then, my gem?”

“Teya, Mooni and Cali,” I said, pointing at the megalith, the Corvix and the barrel with the Felix Arcanicx. “I’m going to send all of you together into infinity, fold you just for a bit, then unfold you.”

Stormy mewled out a translation for Teya.

“Unfold?” Moonalia blinked. “That’s not how…”

“Two spirals!” I explained. “One that pulls things in, one that takes things out! That’s what I saw in the bog! A giant number eight! The symbol for Infinity! A body of water and roots that’s dead and also alive–something that constantly consumes living things to power the entire formation! Don’t you get it?”

The Corvix squinted at me.

“Two spirals,” she repeated, talons tapping against each other. “A body. A gemstone heart... Hum. Maybe. Yes. I think I understand.”

I pulled Cali’s body out of the water barrel and wrapped her hands around Teya’s megalith, still somewhat suspended inside the liquefied barrel.

“Teya,” I ordered as I gently inserted the snowflake into the hole in Cali’s chest. “I want you to make two spirals of water. One spinning inward, reaching towards this artifact, sucking magic in. One behind it, pushing power and magic out!"

Teya nodded. She, unlike the Corvix had no idea about what was happening, but she was a cooperative river now, my trusting friend in this mad, mad world. She focused her will and waved her hands and the Chronacist filled water reached out from the cavern’s lake, creating moving spirals just as I described them to her through Stormy.

“Fill Cali’s chest, surround her body with as much Chronacist as you can! Get all of the Chronacist you’ve gathered from our trip from Svalbard to this damn island!” I ordered. “This large liquefied barrel should help hold it all in place!”

Teya obeyed, packing Chronacist crystals with pressurized water into and around Cali’s body.

Moonalia's talons closed around my left hand as rocks fell all around us with deafening booms. Teya had to slap a few of them with a water hand as they were about to go right through us.

“Say the Words, Ioan!” Moonalia encouraged, slicing her own hand with a talon, her blood pouring into the sucking spiral of water in front of us. “Remember–you have to give up a part of yourself to the Astral Ocean, provide me with an anchor so that I may forever hold onto your hand!”

I nodded as the cavern around us shuddered with the relentless attack of Bobliss from above.

“I'm going to catch you and feast on your brain, Ioan! I'm going to know everything you know and then I'll find exactly where you hid what you stole from my love!” Bobliss boomed, declaring his mad intentions.

“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve seen and… I… I… I'm glad I got to meet you… I think I know what it was that Cali saw in you. I think I now know what it’s like to fall in love with something? Someone,” Mooni stammered out, clinging to my left and glancing over the entire assembly of Cali, submerged megalith covered in Chronacist crystals and two water spirals. “Activate it! Activate it now! It’s ready!”

“Turn the hell on and save us!” I snarled in English at the snowflake in the water reaching into the front water spiral with my right hand. “Have a Good Tomorrow!”

The spiral in front of me ignited with dark flames as the entire ceiling of the cavern began to collapse down on us, ten thousand tons of basalt columns about to turn us into pancakes.

I felt a tugging sensation, as if something was trying to pull me apart at the seams and then with a snap everything was gone.

The cavern, Teya's megalith, Cali's body suspended inside my liquefied barrel between two water spirals and Moonalia holding my hand simply vanished, leaving behind nothing but a faint, shimmering afterimage dancing in my eyes.

I felt like I was everything and nothing.

Like I was endlessness itself and not just a witch-boy named Ioan… like I was the anchor of the entire universe and everything in existence wrapped itself around me, the cavern, the basalt island, the ocean, the glaciers, the entire landscape of a little blue planet called Thornwild. The universe, everything folded from existence, but I remained.

I remained. I existed. I was. Alone. Everywhere and nowhere all at the same time, gravitically or perhaps Astrally spaghettified to infinity, stretched from Thornwild to Endalaus.

[Save Point Unit 92-42-08 active,] a whisper-song-symphony-voice-understanding resounded across infinity. It was said not in words but in ideas, in everything-ness, like pure thought painted on a canvas of nothingness.

I recognized it. It was Mooni’s voice!

Mooni was here! I wasn’t alone in oblivion, wasn’t lost to spaghettification!

[Scanning variables in fold strata.]

[Recognized variable - Corvix Arcanicx Moonalia Cavil] - [Self assigned as Fold Overseer]

Yes! Go Mooni! Do your thing… whatever that thing is because I have no idea what I am or where I am or what this even is. Do I have hands? I don't even have hands. What I have is nothing and everything. What am I? An idea? A thought? A concept, a message of self, an idea bouncing endlessly, pinging itself between Thornwild and Endalaus?

[Recognized variable - Felix Arcanicx Callista Liesl] - [Assigned by Fold Overseer as Save Point Strata gateway anchor]

[Recognized variable - Chronacist Strata Karpathy Galateya] - [Assigned by Fold Overseer as data storage and Fold-Form Strata]

[Recognized variable - Ioan Starfall]

I felt a prickle of something, lines of dancing threads rushing across my endless self, evaluating, collecting, hugging, like infinite hands holding onto me, all of me everywhere across eternity.

[Assigned Status by Fold Overseer as Gateway Administrator]

Information was presented to me. Mountains of information. An entire ocean of gibberish, entwined data, impossible to sort, impossible to comprehend.

[Optimizing. Creating a Save Point. Specify Anchors.]

I felt that the last words-not-words were addressed to me.

[What?] I thought.

[Specify dimensional Anchors for each Fold Variable] Mooni’s voice-not-voice insisted.

Dimensional Anchors for each variable? What was she talking about?

[Defined Variables: [1. Corvix Arcanicx Moonalia Cavil] [2. Felix Arcanicx Callista Liesl] [3. Chronacist Strata Karpathy Galateya] ] Mooni’s voice-not-voice repeated insistently. [Specify dimensional Anchors to Access Variables at a later date from linear-space-time position!]

It took me a minute-not-minute or perhaps an entire eternity for my thoughts to come together into coherency-not-coherency.

I was Ioan Starfall. I was the Administrator of the Fold artifact. I had to specify a part of myself that would anchor the three girls, the three Variables that I wanted to save within the Builder Artifact.

[Gemstone 77 - Corvix Arcanicx Moonalia Cavil] I stated-not-stated, picturing the gem in my mind-not-mind.

[Gemstone 41 - Felix Arcanicx Callista Liesl] I added.

[Gemstone 19 - Chronacist Strata Karpathy Galateya] I finished.

[Optimizing. Saving. Creating a Save Point.]

[Wait.] I thought to Mooni. [I want you back. I want you at my side. All three of you. I don’t want you cast into infinity, existing and not existing!]

[Acknowledged.] Mooni thought-sang-spoke-executed. [Administrative access to Fold Interface granted to Administrator Ioan Starfall. Modify Fold Gateway Strata as you desire.]

Again, the ocean of information, too much gibberish. Too many things at once.

[Simplify,] I thought to Mooni. [Simplify it all for me and help me organize this gibberish. Help me understand!]

[Acknowledged,] the Corvix replied.

A hundred billion threads of her Aura came into existence, each one coordinating, organizing, sorting everything around me into orderly tables, into fractions, into beautiful, coherent, sensible fractals, into data charts and mathematical equations that I understood.

[Perfect,] I thought. [Now, help me put this thing together.]

She did.

I don’t know how much time we worked together, one mind of one human armed with an infinite number of Corvix threads, sorting an ocean of information that had once comprised whatever we were, but eventually…

Eventually we made something completely new, something that did not exist, something that was comprised from everything that the Felix Arcanicx, the Corvix Arcanicx and Chronacist Strata had once been. Something that worked together, like an engine of information, like the machinery of the stars composed from endless fractals that folded into themselves forever.

[I want to send information back. Back to myself,] I suddenly thought. [Answers. Solutions. A way to get to this point. Something that… Stormy can receive, understand!]

[Affirmative,] my assistant replied. [Casting threads. Relaying data.]

[It’s perfect,] I thought as I reassessed the supermassive fractal we'd built within ourselves.

[It’s beautiful,] Mooni responded, her song-voice-not-voice becoming less robotic, just for a moment, just for an instance.

[It’s done?] I thought again.

[It’s good enough,] Mooni confirmed. [We’re out of energy, out of usable variables and atoms and waveforms.]

Energy? Energy was a thing here, in the infinite fall to Endalaus?

[Time and energy are very much a thing on the other side. Tick, tick, tick,] the Corvix replied.

[How do I even use this thing?] I demanded, feeling like something on the other end was trying to pull me back into existence, folding me from endlessness into something finite, something personal.

[You’ve made remotes,] the Corvix answered. [You chose gems 77, 41 and 19 for a reason, have you not? Just flip the switch and unfold each saved-state. Turn the dials all the way up on all of them and activate the Fold Artifact through all three of us!]

I tried to think back to what the hell I had done back then, to a million years, to an infinity ago to where I had been in the beginning of this endless fall.

[Reconstructing Fold Gateway,] Moonalia whisper-sang-projected. [Creating a Save Point. Have a Good Tomorrow, Fold Administrator!]

Falling. I was suddenly falling, not through infinity towards Endalaus, but through the air, holding onto a girl with three sets of eyes and white, crystalline hair.

The ceiling of the cavern was falling down on us, basalt columns smashing into the floor all around, falling on top of us, about to obliterate both of us into uneven puddles of blood and crushed bones.