Corvis Eralith
I decided to abruptly interrupt the tour.
The Interdicathian fair was starting in two days anyway, so cutting Leòn Leurenzian's visit to the Sapinese cities short wouldn't damage the grand event my grandfather had been working on for so long.
Now, beneath the shade of the Hallowed Bountiful, I stood in the backyard of my Awareroom in Azellio, my laboratory standing tall and proud as always upon the eighth of the Holy City's hills.
Below me, within a small pond formed by a dug deviation of the Cyricon River, were all of my Portal Frogs: from the ones stationed in Zestier, to those in Azellio, Eidelholm, Vaelmora, and Elenoir; from the ones in Burim to Pitrah and Vildorial; from Xyrus City to the various Sapinese settlements I had just visited.
The creatures hopped around aimlessly. Their consciousness was not developed enough to even form coherent paths now that they had been abruptly removed from their original tasks.
I sighed heavily. I would have to renounce the use of Portal Frogs for as long as I feared that whoever possessed REtrocurrent's analogue was a threat.
That must have been connected to the sudden disappearance of Asyphin's Portal Frogs, too...
Over the last couple of days, as I collected each Portal Frog and took care of a few remaining businesses across Elenoir and Darv, I had received more desperate attempts at communication through the network.
Other objects, violently morphed by the river of time, had arrived at my feet: Neolithic items like chipped flint spearheads and rough ringstones alongside modern, everyday objects like nail clippers.
It was incredibly amateurish, even desperate in its blind insistence. Who wanted to contact me so badly?
Their use of REtrocurrent lacked any real finesse and seeing as I had never experienced an involuntary pull from the river, they probably didn't even understand how time travel truly worked.
Which left me racking my brain over who the culprit might be.
It wasn't Agrona—at least, not directly. I was absolutely certain of that.
The last time Agrona tried to interfere with the river of time (when he forcefully attempted the reincarnation of Cecilia as the Legacy), Fate had violently screamed in my mind, throwing me into the river and demanding my intervention.
So... could there be a second Arbiter out there? There was only one way to find out.
I raised my foot and looked down at my Portal Frogs. I hated what I was about to do, but I couldn't find any downside to it other than sheer annoyance and mild inconvenience.
I couldn't risk leaving the network open. With the Re-Construction Greatrune, I could always remake my Portal Frogs with little more than a thought later. Better safe than sorry.
My boot came down on the first creature, squashing it and instantly dissolving the REbelf into a puddle of shimmering Trucewater. Only its small malachite horns remained, peeking through the short grass of my Awareroom's backyard.
There was no reaction from the other Portal Frogs; survival instinct was little more than a vague suggestion for them, overridden by the simple reminder that they existed only to obey my orders—orders they didn't currently have.
One, two, three... with cold, mechanical efficiency, I killed all but one of the Portal Frogs. When only a single amphibian remained, I withdrew something from my dimensional storage ring: the empty glass container of a Spell-in-a-Bottle, the exact same type of Djinnic bottle the latest batches of Magician Potions were stored in.
The Spell-in-a-Bottle was a genuine Djinnic Lifework; it could safely travel through the river of time without suffering from temporal alteration.
I would send one final message back to the other side and then permanently sever the link by killing this last frog.
I had originally wanted to do something a bit more extreme: Capture a moment in the river and cross over personally to investigate. But something actively prevented me from teleporting.
Was the destination too distant? The only landmass I could think of that was too far for my Portal Frogs to take me was... Alacrya.
I took the Manatech bottle and carefully engraved it with the Articles of Balance and Solidarity to make its structure even more resilient and stable.
Then, taking a sheet of thick elven parchment from inside my Awareroom, I wrote my reply.
I wrote it using the blazing plume of Mordain that I always kept with me in my storage ring; that way, the magical ink wouldn't risk being altered in transit. (Every written object I had received through the river of time so far had had its words morphed into countless different, unreadable alphabets.)
On the paper, I wrote one single, unequivocal message meant for this supposed Arbiter of Fate:
Let's meet in the river of time.
Once the final Portal Frog swallowed the bottle and the missive alongside it, I promptly ended its service.
Whatever the result would end up being, the die had been cast.
—
"As silent as ever, huh?" I murmured aloud, staring up at the dizzying storm of Fate, where infinite golden threads turned and twisted above the river that ran beneath all of reality.
I stood upon the calm shores of The Atoll, the central island anchored in the middle of the endless, branching sections of the river of time.
I had thrust Fiorwato straight through my own chest a few hours after sending that final message via the Portal Frog. And now, I stood here barefoot, the conceptual non-water of the river of time lapping against the shore as my backdrop.
I clenched the non-physical fists of my Soul-Body; the aspect of a twenty-something young half-elf, half-Phoenix—the form of Mordain Asclepius's son in the prime of his years, the original soul that had been sacrificed to make space for Fate's Arbiter to reincarnate.
But if there were two Arbiters? What could that possibly mean?
I had no reason to believe the existence of my position could be a dual one, at least not concurrently.
The Ancient Mages had strictly referred to the Justiciar as a singular entity, and the Justiciar was just another name for the Arbiter.
Adamant on seeing this through, I scanned the horizon, searching for absolutely anyone other than myself in this endless conceptual river, but I saw no one.
"Are they in another section of the river?" I asked upwards, addressing Fate directly.
This time, an answer did come—not vocally, of course, but through a sudden, heavy wave of Insight washing over my mind.
"Bloodlet... Bourne..." I repeated aloud, tasting the ominous name that had just spawned in my head. "What is that?"
I walked across the pale beach of The Atoll to reach the Petaldrift stranded upon it. It was a typical elven gondola, a vessel my own Insight had subconsciously produced in this otherworldly realm so I could safely travel between the river's treacherous sections and The Atoll.
I hoisted the sleek, long boat upright, grabbed the wooden paddle, and pushed the Petaldrift out into the swirling waters of the river.
Digging the paddle into the metaphysical current, I left the safety of The Atoll behind. I ventured out towards this mysterious Bloodlet Bourne: the location where I would finally find whoever else possessed REtrocurrent.
The calm, neutral waters surrounding The Atoll eventually disappeared.
After an amount of time I had no way to quantify (nor did I think it was actually quantifiable, as time didn't truly flow in this river the way it did in the waking world) I arrived in a profoundly unsettling land.
The conceptual non-water here had taken on the exact properties of blood in its various states of decay: from the hot, rushing liquid found inside an artery to thick, blackened clots of coagulated sludge.
Like navigating the exposed veins of a flayed giant, I rowed the Petaldrift through winding canals of rust-red liquid that cut across endless plains of colourless, lifeless rock.
A cloying haze of ruby red blanketed the Bloodlet Bourne, a fog composed entirely of atomised blood cells rather than water vapour.
I had grown quite accustomed to strange places during this second life of mine, and I liked (foolishly, maybe) to consider myself hardened against the extraordinary.
I had seen the sheer vastness of the Elshire Forest with its countless peculiar trees; the resetting Dungeons that exhumed the architectural masterpieces of the ancient Djinn; the subterranean depths of the Darvish caverns, and, of course, the cosmic scale of the river of time and Fate itself.
But none of those places felt truly alien. Ancient? Of course; compared to me, everything in this world was ancient. Intimidating and beautiful? That was the inherent nature of a magical world like Pax Coronata.
But the Bloodlet Bourne possessed no beauty, no sense of wonder.
It was a bleak, visceral hellscape: everything I imagined the abyssal domain of a demon might look like.
Who were the people that brought this grotesque manifestation of the river of time into existence?
Fate, through the silent conduit of REtrocurrent, fed me the answer.
The Wraiths. The lost, ninth ancient race of Asuras that had inhabited Dicathen in an epoch so unimaginably distant that it made the entire history of the Djinn look as though it had happened only yesterday.
This slaughtered race—the very first victims of the Indrath's dogma—had been the ones to carve the Bloodlet Bourne out from the depths of the river of time, a metaphysical scar left behind by their collective existence; just like the Djinns with the Truce-Waters or the other Asuras, mainly Dragons, woth the Warworn Rapids.
Suddenly, the Petaldrift violently pitched to the side, threatening to capsize.
A massive geyser of boiling gore erupted from the centre of the rivulet—surging upwards with the violent pressure of a severed carotid artery.
I was thrown off balance, desperately fighting to correct the boat's route.
I jammed the wooden paddle against a jagged, colourless rock formation jutting from the bloody current, groaning as I forcefully stabilised the elven vessel.
"Dammit... not being able to use mana is a nightmare," I lamented, awkwardly wrestling the boat back on track.
Even residing within the healthy, physically grown Soul-Body of Nabyun Asclepius, I struggled without magic. I had definitely grown far too reliant on my intimate relationship with mana to navigate physical hardships.
I continued my slow, arduous exploration of the Wraiths' graveyard, the alien landscape stretching endlessly around me.
That was, until I rounded a bend in the crimson river and the paddle slipped from my numb fingers. I froze, my eyes locking onto the impossible horizon.
There lay the source of the torrential blood.
An enormous, eldritch insectoid monstrosity lay dead upon the jagged plains, its half-skeletal carcass dominating the horizon. Or maybe it was the horizon itself.
It was an anomaly of cyclopean scale, a lovecraftian horror so unfathomably massive that my mind actively rejected trying to comprehend its true dimensions.
Impossibly thin, multi-jointed legs pierced the crimson heavens like monolithic obsidian spires, while a rotting carapace and withered, membranous wings cast a shadow over the entire realm.
"What the Winter is that?" I asked Fate above, a cold, suffocating dread clawing up from the deepest recesses of my Soul-Body as I stared at the bleeding corpse god.
It was too big to be fully visualised, its geometry seeming to warp and break the very space around it, despite it laying Fate-only-knew how many kilometres away.
No answer came. The river of time remained perfectly, horrifyingly silent regarding the origins of that dead god.
And somehow, the vast, empty silence of the cosmos, the realization that some horrors were beyond Fate's willingness to explain, was infinitely more terrifying than any truth could have been.
I swallowed hard, forcing my trembling hands to grip the paddle once more. I was not here to question the maddening origins of this place. I was here to search for the only other person in the universe capable of sharing this mind-shattering sight with me.
Caera Vritra
Let's meet in the river of time.
It had worked! I had managed to contact the Arbiter, and the Arbiter had actually answered me.
Cecilia's help had been priceless in finding a way to simulate the strange, temporal frogs. Without her, whatever I had been attempting to build lacked life.
But that mysterious power of hers—a force I was strictly prohibited from interfering with—had helped me bridge the gap.
She had defied the High Sovereign, the very entity whose name alone made her tremble, just to help me. I could not let this approaching interaction with th Arbiter go to waste.
The Bloodlet Bourne had claimed me abruptly, startling my focused mind. I had been in the middle of fighting the Retainer of Etril, Mawar Vritra, just before manifesting here.
After all, I was still the Retainer to the Scythe of Sehz-Clar. Whenever the High Sovereign, to whom all of humankind bowed, did not actively require my presence, I was subjected to her will—and Scythe Seris had demanded I duel Melzri's Retainer.
Now, I stared at the insectoid corpse god in the distance, and the hellish, bleeding landscape that its ancient wounds fed.
The Arbiter must have felt so profoundly alone if he had been the only one to access this place until now.
But that was assuming the Arbiter was as human as I desperately hoped them to be, and not just another shade of monster entirely indistinguishable from Agrona Vritra.
The silence of the river of time—interrupted only by the boiling blood sputtered by occasional geysers, the low, wet churning of the current, and the deep hum of the golden threads in the sky—was oppressive.
The only thing I could do to ease the suffocating dread was to turn my back on the corpse god.
I anxiously stamped my foot against the lifeless ground, grimacing as the thick, congealed blood stuck to the colourless rocks like a sickening coat of paint.
How long has this blood been coating this rock? I asked myself, genuinely dizzy at the existential implications of this otherworldly realm.
I wondered if this was how the Relictombs felt to untrained Ascenders, sent to explore the deadly pocket dimension in the name of Almighty Vritra, only to die a pointless, terrifying death in the dark.
I admit I had always harboured a certain fascination with the Relictombs; the idea of exploring undiscovered zones and challenging myself felt like a fun distraction from the grim reality of my life, well before I ever became a Retainer.
But if the Relictombs felt anything like the Bloodlet Bourne? Maybe making myself small and trying to simply not exist was the better option.
Who was I to get caught in this cosmic war between Asuras and Arbiters?
"No, this mindset is wrong, Caera," I scolded myself aloud. "Look at what it is doing to poor Cecilia..."
My inner turmoil was shattered by a sight I could never have imagined: a boat. A sleek, elegant canoe was drifting through the intricate, bloody rivulets of the Bourne.
The boatman locked eyes with me, his expression one of complete and utter shock.
He had mismatched eyes: the left was a bright, piercing orange with yellowish stripes, like a blazing sunrise; the right was a lush green set against a subtle background of teal—the exact same teal as the temporal frogs!
He had strange, sharply pointed ears like the elves that were said to inhabit the distant continent of Dicathen: the wild, untamed land that knew nothing of Almighty Vritra's gift or the High Sovereign's rule.
Wavy hair the colour of burnt copper was tied back in a messy ponytail as he carefully approached the shore where I was standing.
He didn't look any older than me (the physically mature version of me residing in this ethereal body, at least).
Don't let yourself be intimidated, Caera, I told myself. You have witnessed and suffered Agrona Vritra's worst cruelty. Nothing can be worse than him, right?
"Arbiter, I have come as you asked," I called out, walking down the rocky slope towards the shore where his strange canoe now docked.
The horrible, thick water of the Bloodlet Bourne crashed against the shoreline, soaking the rocks with lifeblood.
The Arbiter blinked in a daze, and I offered him my hand (he would recognise it as a sign of greeting, right?).
"I am... Caera," I said, pointedly omitting the 'Vritra' parts for now. The absolute last thing I wanted was for him to think I was an obedient puppet of the High Sovereign. "I require your help for—"
"How can you be here?" the Arbiter interrupted, his voice trembling slightly, as if seeing me had unsettled something deep inside his soul. "What has Agrona done?"
Straight to the point... I thought, my heart thundering against my ribs as I stood face-to-face with this mythic Arbiter. He wasn't much taller than me, though this older, ethereal body of mine was quite tall to begin with.
"I am currently subjected to the whims of the High Sovereign," I informed him, doing my absolute best not to sound like the desperate teenager I was, but like a proper Retainer: calm, measured, and professional. "He is trying to discover your 'authorities,' as he called them, by experimenting on me. Helping me escape is in your best interests."
Was I being too arrogant? Should I be more... submissive? But if I bowed and begged, then the Arbiter would truly just be another shade of monster expecting worship, another facet of Agrona Vritra.
The Arbiter stared at me... and the look on his face was startlingly human. He was doing his best to hide it, but I knew perfectly well what raw terror looked like. I had seen it on the faces of almost everyone I had ever met in Alacrya.
My heart sank a little deeper. If even the Arbiter of Fate was terrified of Agrona Vritra, what chance did anyone else have against him?
The sky of threads above twisted in its everlasting storm of gold, and a geyser of blood erupted violently in the distance, all while the mastodontic carcass of the corpse god observed us in silent judgment.
"What has he discovered? And how has he done it?" the Arbiter prompted urgently.
"He called it time travel..." I said, biting my lip at the visceral reminiscence of what the High Sovereign had inflicted upon me. "He forced me to swallow the blood of a teal frog. He says I possess something called the Legacy of Insight."
"Legacy... of Insight?" the Arbiter echoed, the colour draining from his face.
"You know what that is?!" I found myself asking, my professional facade slipping. "My friend, Cecilia... she possessed the Legacy once. That is why the High Sovereign even allows me to spend time with her. But her knowledge of the Legacy is... she doesn't know what it is, not even what it does. She just had it, and she cursed every single moment of her life because of it."
Why was I opening up to the Arbiter so easily? Yes, I had to tell him everything useful, but I should have remained much colder.
The Arbiter looked up, as if seeking counsel from the golden threads in the sky; something I knew many people did when seeking inspiration or sparks of genius from the stars.
"It happened a few months ago..." the Arbiter started, his voice heavy with a profound, crushing weight. Was it guilt? No, but something very, very close to guilt it remained. "Agrona Vritra was attempting the reincarnation of the Legacy—of Cecilia—to make her his living weapon. To conquer the whole world and bring it to its knees."
He looked back down at me, his mismatched eyes swirling with sorrow.
"He failed. Or, at least, so I thought. I fought against Agrona Vritra for the ultimate claim over Cecilia's soul," the Arbiter continued softly. "But in our metaphysical clash here in the river, the standoff eventually broke, resulting in the fragmentation of the Legacy itself. If only I had not faltered with Cecilia... you wouldn't be dragged into all of this. I am so sorry."
I was left speechless for a moment, the ambient, visceral churn of the Bloodlet Bourne left to fill the heavy silence. To know that all the deaths, all the fear, all the tears and sheer desperation I had suffered since being dragged by the Wraiths into Taegrin Caelum was the Arbiter's fault...
I half-expected my Vritra Blood to boil and demand violent retribution.
But here, so far away from the real world, I felt so... myself. I felt freer than I had ever been in my entire life. There were no dark urges simmering in my veins, no sovereign magic demanding I become a monster for the All-Knowledgeable One's glory.
"I would have been mixed up in this anyway," I said, shaking my head and sighing heavily. "I would still be a Retainer, and I would still be a Vritra. I would still be a weapon ready to be brandished in a hopeless war, condemned to die for a sadistic god who claims a monopoly over happiness. The Legacy of Insight at least gives me the strength to fight back, right? And you spared Cecilia! That is better than anything the Sovereigns have ever done for a single Alacryan!"
The Arbiter chuckled, a warm, genuine sound that felt entirely out of place in this hellscape. "Are you trying to comfort me?" he asked, a faint, sad smile touching his lips. "Usually, it is my sister who does that..."
He definitely was not an Agrona Vritra or a Kezess Indrath. He was... just someone forced into this cosmic bloodshed against his will. Like me. Like Cecilia.
"I like to look at the bright side of things," I said softly, the tension finally leaving my shoulders. "It helps to keep moving on despite everything."
"Thank you," the Arbiter replied, his mismatched eyes softening. "I will do everything in my power to help you escape Taegrin Caelum. Agrona keeps you and Cecilia there, right?"
I nodded, but my expression quickly tightened. "That will not be so easy," I warned him, needing him to grasp the full reality of my situation. "First, I need to free myself from the yoke of Vritra's blood. Otherwise, the High Sovereign will be able to just... forcefully take control of my body."
"I know someone who has trained against that exact compulsion for decades," the Arbiter said mysteriously, his gaze seeming to drift away as a plan began to form in his mind. "Thank you for everything, Caera. You don't know how much I owe you."
"What is your name?" I asked, stepping just a fraction closer to the shoreline. "I don't want to just call you
Arbiter."
The Arbiter paused. He seemed to genuinely think about it, as if he were carefully considering which name to choose.
"Corvis Eralith."