Music for today:
When Fate Answers Back - Secession Studios
https://youtu.be/Z-krGEQ2kio
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Chapter 483: Gambles
Mid Evening - Early Summer : Year 39 : Within The Void
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- Krystallo ~
*Vwoop* "Wh-" My voice crept out with a quiver and a choke as the room around me vanished, and my gaze was consumed by an infinitely deep darkness.
There was no air, no gravity, no weight to existence itself, and yet thinking I had a chance to understand it, the grief, anxiety, and fear filling my body were frozen by something akin to survival instinct.
But that space wasn't something the likes of me could fathom. It was.. reserved for higher beings...
Beings.. I was blind to...
Looking up at Brother, seeing him lit by not only the glow of his own mana, but a reddish hue that seemed to come from every direction, my mind spun.
No matter the direction I looked, it was an infinite darkness, not like I had shut my eyes, or like I was standing in a dark room.. but like I was floating in a space so unfathomably vast that light never had anything to bounce off. -W..what...- Merely looking out into that abyss would set off something primal in you.. a gut-wrenching fear that you don't belong—like you had wandered into a monsters nest without realizing.
It was such a primally horrifying feeling that before I even realized, the tears that were just streaming down my face had sublimated into a thing of the past. -What i..is this place..?-
But that fear carving itself into my bones vanished the moment Brother's voice reached my ears. "Krystallo," His tone was gentle, yet woven with concern. "As soon as you find yourself uncomfortable, tell me. It doesn't matter how badly you wish to stay, the moment you feel any discomfort at all, no matter what kind.. you tell me, okay?"
The way he spoke was different from any other time I had heard him.. like time itself was being woven with his words.
But despite my lack of understanding, I mustered a nod—returning my eyes to the encompassing darkness as the pace of my breathing sped up and slowed down like time itself was warping with it.
It truly just felt.. surreal.
Letting my mind drift in the darkness, the difference between an instant and an eternity blended until I couldn't tell them apart anymore.
It was like.. time had become a fluid that ebbed and flowed unlike the steady constant I was used to.
And it was only then, after what could have either been a second or a millennia, that the instinctive freeze on my mind lifted. "Is this place.. the void..?" My voice escaped like something less than a breath—incomplete and different from what I knew to be my own.
But seeing my expression taint with confusion only made Brother chuckle. "Hah, you finally break out of your trance?" His smile was soft and relieved.
But I wasn't following. "Huh?" His demeanor was different.. now both meeker and calmer. "How long was I..?"
His smile warmed. "Almost a year."
I choked. *Cough* "HW-What?!"
"Don't worry, it's easy to lose track of it here."
But I wasn't buying it. "Th-That can't be right... I can't go that long without food, water, and rest like you can."
Turning to me with a gentle flutter in his wings, a wash of mana blew through my body, and with it, a refreshing wave followed. "You can with some help."
-Woah...- My eyes widened as they fell to my paw, lit a light pink by the void. "Was it actually.. that long..?"
He was quick to nod as he turned back to a tiny speck floating before him like a distant star in the night sky. "Its only the beginning though, so it'd be best not to dwell on it."
Pausing my thoughts for a moment, I gave the void one final, somewhat worried glance before trying to focus on the tiny floating sparkle. "Then.. what have you been up to in that time..?"
"Well..." He paused before the star-like speck suddenly moved toward me. "I've been working on this."
But distance didn't help me see anything. "What exactly is it..?"
"It's an egg... Technically one of yours, though its only a copy."
"E..Excuse me..?" Every wandering thought I had vanished in that instant. "Why..?"
His expression, momentarily a bit awkward, quickly tightened and fell once more. "It's to make Mother an entirely new body."
My head spun.
But little did I know.. that was just the beginning...
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- Vasilias ~
"As things are now, her body is.. irrecoverable.. so instead of trying to do something truly hopeless and trying to heal it, I made a copy of one of your eggs, and adjusted the genetics to be a clone of her." Pulling the egg closer to me again, I stiffened. "I'm hoping to create an entirely new body for her, and then once its of age, try to transplant her soul into it..."
But that was all far easier said than done, and Krystallo knew it... "Won't that take like.. hundreds of years..?"
I nodded with a burden. "Hundreds of years of constant hurdles..."
Worry flooded her eyes as her posture drained. "You.. don't sound very confident..."
My expression quickly fell the same. "It's.. unexplored territory for me..."
Despite having spent almost a year thinking, theorizing, and experimenting to find a way to save Mother, it was still the best option I had come up with... A hail mary that was only a possibility because I didn't know enough to predict the outcome. -I don't know how I'm going to do even half of what I'll need to, but...- As things were, it was my only choice with even the slimmest chance of success.
However, even though she certainly knew how bleak the odds were, Krystallo kept her head high. "Then, how can I help..?" She was nervous, and clearly uneasy.
But seeing her step forward gave me an inkling of hope. "This may take some time to learn, but..."
She nodded with a curious flick in her tail.
"I want you to circulate your mana as if you were having a dragon sleep."
Her head tilted with interest and confusion finally overtaking the encroaching dread and hopelessness. "How should I do that..?" Looking downward—inward—I could see her mind accelerating again.
"Spin the mana in your reserve, and try to squeeze it as much as you can in the middle."
"And with the mana I can't squeeze..?"
"Control its release out the top and bottom of your reserve."
Truthfully, it was an outrageous request.. something I was certain would take years for her to learn, if it was learnable at all.
"That seems.. hard..."
But while I hoped to never tell her, it was likely going to determine how far this hail mary flew... -Seeing how her mana meshes and flows with Mother's.. she might be able to stabilize the flow of her mana as well...- And in turn calm the turbulence that was tearing apart Mother's soul within her reserve without me having to do something more drastic.
However, for the moment, we had time.
Continuing with some essentially idle discussion—talks of science, math, and theoretical magics—time flew again.
Having finally taken the leap of faith to artificially inseminate the egg with another clone of Mother's genetics, over the course of the next year and several months, the tiny, nearly invisible speck had grown into a large, healthy egg that took an appearance neither of us expected.
It was.. feathered...
Unlike the silver, almost ivory-looking scaled eggs we hatched from, hers was covered in a blend of thinner, whiter scales with fluffy down feathers blanketing them.
Truthfully, it was quite a sight to behold. -Her genetics are identical, and yet...- She looked so different.
But thinking it was just the egg, around a month later, when it was time to hatch her, we expected to find a young hatchling similar-looking to young Krystallo.
However, that was far from the case.
Whether from my presence, my mana, or something else entirely, the dragon that hatched from that egg looked like a completely different being.
Curled with her head inside her tail, she was completely covered in feathers, soaked from the inside of the egg, yet emitted a chill that froze all but the egg's slime around her.
She looked like.. an entirely different dragon... -How.. does that make sense...-
She was an identical copy at the genetic level, yet had grown into something entirely unique. "Maybe.. she'll look more like what we know when she grows some..?"
But that wasn't the case either. With the passage of another year, her two bodies strayed further and further apart. Her horns grew with small curls, and her feathers, while many fell out, remained thick along her neck, spine, and underside, with a bright blue glow flowing through them similar to the purple glow within my fur and scales.
Had I not monitored the growth and mitosis of every cell in her body, I'd have believed it was from genetic mutations.. after all, this body was conceived in a rather unique manner...
But without that explanation, or the means to correct or fix the changes, the odds of the experiment succeeding plummeted.
The more different her new body was from the old, the more likely her soul would reject it.. and as for what differences mattered, I had no idea...
Yet with every passing day, her new body only seemed more and more different. -Shit...-
But eventually, the time to simply ignore the odds and make another leap of faith came.
Before we had even realized, it was time for her new body's first dragon sleep...
And truthfully.. I wasn't sure it even had a chance of succeeding without the possession of a soul.. after all, dragon sleeps are events deeply tied to the soul.
So it was time to make a gamble...
-Do I try and transfer her soul into this body now...- Something I was almost certain would end in failure... -Or simply let it happen.. and see what comes of it...-
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