The Ruler of Ruin

I tuned Arx Maxima out for a while after she admitted that my participation wasn’t vital to her testing me. It felt better to let my mind wander than listen to the stream of information I couldn’t comprehend and had no context for. Once Maxima realized her blathering was having a detrimental effect on my mood she quit talking to me and let me be. It’d been a very long, eventful day since waking up early in Havenstone until now.

“Emery, please look at this.” Maxima’s voice broke me out of reliving the feel of Amaranthine’s fingers in my hair. For some reason, it almost felt like she was standing behind me, ready to grab a handful of my hair and twist. Yet no matter how quickly I shifted my eyes, I didn’t catch any glimpse of anyone else.

Arx Maxima tsked to get my attention.

An illusory image appeared in front of me, kind of like the ones Glint made. Only this one glowed and shimmered brightly, and it seemed artificial in a way that Glint’s illusion magic didn’t. For one, it didn’t carry any kind of scent. Glint’s illusions always had a strong scent component. When I sniffed at the illusion, I swore I heard a tinkle of laughter from somewhere.

“What am I looking at here?” I asked. It looked like someone had taken a bunch of plates and connected them with towers and bridges. While I looked at it my perspective danced around, revealing the scale of the hologram to be beyond my comprehension. Words like big, huge, or colossal didn’t do the scale of Arx Maxima justice. I lacked the words to fully describe how big Arx Maxima was. She was larger than anything I could possibly imagine. All of the True World wasn’t even a third of a single one of the countless plates that made up Arx Maxima.

“My old body.” Arx Maxima answered. “The Ultimate and Final Citadel, the Stronghold of the Stellarae Enclave.”

“You were a big girl, huh? Who were the Stellarae Enclave? I’ve never heard of them.” I tried to downplay the scale that this image hinted at by letting my mind latch onto something else.

“Yes. You will learn more about the Stellarae Enclave in time. They all died. Now, it is time to wake up so that you may awaken as an enkindler, and share in my power.”

With those words the room around me turned to darkness, and I fell through pitch blackness, until I impacted something. The ground? My body felt completely and totally numb, but that numbness receded slowly. Everything ached, as if I’d worked out far too hard the day before. I jerked upward, and promptly vomited. It felt like there were shards of glass inside my whole body.

I was in the cave. The crystal that was Arx Maxima was gone. Shards of crystal lay on the ground around me, shattered into debris. Blood, my blood, covered the whole area, crystal shards, rocks, walls, even the ceiling had a few pieces of hair and blood on them. I vomited again.

Nothing remained of my clothes or belongings. I’d always wanted to be stranded in a cave, naked, surrounded by an environment splashed with my own blood. All that was missing from this being a nightmare was a man with a giant cleaver and a butchers apron. Maybe we never escaped that psyghast thing after all, and I was about to be fed on.

Light flowed out of my hand and formed a small pyramidal shape, maybe an inch big, of golden crystal. It was much, much tinier than the black crystal Corvusol had followed Amaranthine with. I felt a surge of competitiveness, and vowed to make my crystal for Arx Maxima larger than Amaranthine’s was for Corvusol. Not that I even knew if I could make it bigger. Before I could inquire, Arx Maxima’s voice chimed in my mind.

“Ignore the surroundings. We must awaken your powers before a threat manifests. Stare into me.” The crystal spoke into my mind with Arx Maxima’s voice, then proceeded to blink and flash with small pulses of light. When I first looked at the crystal, I swore I saw Amaranthine’s smirking face looking back at me, before the reflection faded and my eyes focused onto the crack that ran through the tiny crystal.

“Breath deeply, but evenly.” I did as commanded and could feel my body fading away as I entered a trance. Meditation had been a large component of instruction for those who used magic at the Academy, and since I was the only blank, there’d been a lot of meditation. I’d found it useful to learn control of my body, eventually, but the first few years of being stuck learning something I didn’t think I could use had always pissed me off.

“I am a citadel. I am the stronghold of the Stellarae Enclave. My fortifications protect the Enclave, my battlements destroy the enemies of the Enclave. Towers, Castles, Citadels, Fortresses, Keeps, and Strongholds are splinters of my greatness. See me. Know me. Bind me.”

The flashing lights and beat of words Arx Maxima used lulled me into a meditative state where I only dimly knew my body. I could feel four parts of me that were empty, or devoid, of something. My heart, my arms, my legs, and my head were the rough regions of each of these four places of emptiness.

I reached out, somehow, and touched Arx Maxima.

Images flickered through my mind. Real images, maybe, but images of defensive fortifications, weapon towers, platforms that shot beams that broke planets into pieces then pulled them into be reformed into other matter, battlements launched projectiles that reduced moons to rubble which then became another part of Arx Maxima. Simple walls, where humanoids in robes practiced mock combat to take control of the top of a platform. I recognized that as king of the hill.

What do I want?

My own voice asked me.

I wanted to build, and be, a bastion of… something. I wouldn’t say order, because I didn’t aspire to be another King of Solarias, but I wanted a place where people I liked could be safe and protected from the wild, chaotic world outside of Solarias. Somewhere Mom and Dad could live without being under the thumb of that asshole Mithras.

I needed to be able to build fortifications. Powerful walls and barriers to safeguard everything behind them.

“There, yes. Now transpose it into yourself.”

The it that Arx Maxima talked about coalesced into a sphere, with a three-dimensional construct of a wall. I imagined grabbing it, and when I visualized pushing it into my heart, that’s what happened. It flowed into me.

“How?” I didn’t know how to make it stay. It bobbled to and fro as I tried to think about how to do it.

“Enkindle it.”

I refrained from shouting swear words. What the fuck did that even mean?

Well. Enkindle meant fire, right? Lighting something on fire, or inspiring? I Imagined the sphere and its imagery rendered by my own mind in the emptiness of my heart. As if I had been a wood burning artist my whole life, a version of the basic defensive wall, the cornerstone of a fortress, appeared in my heart. When the last touch of my imaginary brand finished the image, power flowed into it. My dumpy little wall transformed into a truly impressive image of an immense citadel.

“Open your eyes,” Arx Maxima commanded.

I opened my eyes while power coursed through my body for the first time. The aches and pains, the pins and needles all throughout me, even my nakedness was forgotten in the excitement of the rush of power I felt. My body pulled in every wisp of mist in the area, and a solid stream of deep violet mist flowed out of the tiny crystal of Arx Maxima into me. The mists from the crystal were far more potent than the lighter mists that inhibited the cavern.

“How do I…. do things?” I asked. I was ready to throw fireballs and be an adventurer, now.

“You bound Citadel to your heart, or Vitality. Feel the resonance of my power with the beat of your heart. When you open yourself to it, you should feel an ability manifest. Every concept may hold five abilities, and the act of binding only unlocks one of them. We will talk about the other four abilities later.”

I followed Arx Maxima’s instructions. With each beat of my heart, I grew more aware of the grandeur of the enkindled concept within me, and my mind filled with walls. Tall walls, wide walls, diagonal walls, horizontal walls, walls staggered to become a dense fortification. All these walls were made of what looked like a dense gray stone with a smooth sheen. It looked almost as if someone had made concrete and then glazed it, honestly. Was that the term? I’d never done construction.

“Visualize the effect and manifest it.” The tiny floating pyramid of crystal that was Arx Maxima urged me on.

I visualized a normal ten foot by ten-foot wall, and its ghost appeared in my sight. I focused on creating a wall, and it wavered back and forth between materialization and ghostly illusion, until finally it completely solidified. I felt the most minuet drain of energy as it happened, and then there was a large ten foot by ten foot by one-foot thick wall in the middle of the cave.

“I did it! Holy crap, I can do magic now!” I practically jumped for joy.

“No, you cannot. This isn’t magic. Our powers are based upon the usage of astral energy. If you must label it something, label it as astral manipulation.”

“Does it really matter? I have powers, Maxi!”

“I must insist you do not call me that, and yes. Words matter a great deal, Emery. Your visualization of me, as a concept, will alter the abilities you gain from our connection. Perception is very important when it comes to the details of the concepts one binds to themselves.”

“Okay. So, I can make walls. I get how that relates to a citadel. Walls and fortifications are a basic part of any defense.” I didn’t want to sound ungrateful to Arx Maxima. She said I’d get more abilities, and more concepts, but I’ll admit that I felt a little embarrassed that my first power was to make a wall. As I stared at the wall, I realized I couldn’t just dismiss it, either. It was permanent.

“Now what? Do you have any clothes for me? What happened to my pack, shield, and spear?” The cavern wasn’t cold, it was kind of warm but I was in the wilds, and the cave coming to Arx Maxima had been full of crab monsters and doubtlessly lots of other nasty customers. A wall wasn’t going to kill my enemies.

“If we bind my envoy aspect to your Strength, or arms, I can guide you through the process of summoning a weapon.”

“Can’t we just add that to my Vitality?” I asked. I was hoping to get an explanation.

“No. Vitality abilities are best used for defensive and utility purposes, and you won’t be able to awaken further abilities within Vitality without experimentation and exploration of your current abilities. Additionally, the raw physical capabilities you gain increase with each concept you awaken. With two concepts bound, you will be more than four times stronger than you were with none.”

I did feel stronger. Faster. Smarter. Well, not smarter, but more able to process information and respond to it.

“So, do we do the same thing as before?” I asked with excitement. All of my life had been spent training with a spear, desperately trying to prove myself capable, and I had almost nothing to show for it. In a few heartbeats, I’d grown tremendously in strength and gained a power. To say that I was ready to do it again was an understatement.

“Before we delve into the next step, it is important for you to understand what I was, is not what I am. The Stellarae Enclave is gone, and reality as it once existed is now impossible to return to. This aspect of me, Arx Maxima, will change as you change it. Its base is formed by the past, but its heights and end will be formed by our joint actions. Do you understand, my Emissary?” Arx Maxima sounded slightly troubled by this. There was no sense of recrimination, that I could really tell, but she seemed to feel it was important. Maybe she felt guilty about what the Stellarae Enclave had done in the past?

“I don’t, but I’ll figure it out. You’re talking like Remy does, so do you have a troubled past?”

“Creatures of the mist have picked up the scent of your blood. We must be quick.” Arx Maxima chided me and offered no answers to the question. I took her deflection to be an admission of guilt.