Just a Bystander

The corruption that Devon had sensed earlier bloomed painfully in everyone's awareness, with Caden at its epicentre. It washed out in cloying waves, and Devon and Kevan dropped him and scrambled backwards, possessed by a mindless fear. But when they tried to retreat over the threshold, the doors slammed shut with heavy finality.

A presence was filling the space, dark and malignant. Blind panic sent Devon stumbling around, hugging the wall as he desperately tried to find some other way out. It was like that time with the lake augera all over again when he had been thrown into the abyssal waters; that terrible, terrible void, where he had almost drowned in despair and—

'...help me...'

He froze. He recognised that mind. It was the same one that had reached into the darkness with an auric-ambient-flare that was as radiant as the noonday sun and pulled him out of the hungry void. That brief flare of recognition gave him just enough presence of mind to reassess what he was doing.

It was hard to focus on what was going on in the physical world. The presence had grown and swelled into something colossal that couldn't possibly have fit into the Spire, but there it was anyway. It roiled and rumbled, a hurricane of ineffable emotions and thoughts, and they were little candles all about to be snuffed out.

Devon pressed himself against the wall and slid to the floor, still a hair's breadth away from losing his grip completely. The cold, black marble beneath his fingers was all he could be certain of. There, woven into the floor, were minuscule golden glyphs, skittering off into the unknown. Somewhere out there, in the storm that Caden carried within him, Jerric and the twins were probably lost.

There is no storm, Devon managed to tell himself, his thoughts ragged. Ignore the physical. Ignore the physical. I am butter.

It was no good. He couldn't slip into the arcana. But that thought of melting butter brought forth a memory of warmth: of making pancakes in the early hours of the morning and wrapping them in a fuzzy barrier to slow heat loss. He had taught Caden how to do it. Something clicked in his head now — he could make one for himself to slow the loss of his sense of self.

The sequence he had come up with came easily, and instead of using the glyph for heat, he swapped in the glyphs for transmutation and one that was self-referential. Instinctively, he also focused on the shape of his own auric-ambient-flare, blending it into his understanding of the sequence even as he shaped the arcana around him.

The storm of darkness did not abate, but it became something that made a little more sense. It was like finally stepping under a tiny umbrella in the middle of a torrential downpour. He was still wet, cold, and miserable, and the rain was still pounding down on that meagre shelter, drenching his shoulders and soaking into his clothes, but at least it wasn't striking his face directly any more.

'...no, no, monstrous-horror-{~!~}, no, no, my words, my words...!'

There it was again! Caden's mind! Devon seized on to that faint echo and allowed himself to be dragged into the sea of arcana by it. The horrific darkness around him fell away as he delved beneath the perturbations on the surface of the arcana, and suddenly he could think again.

'You are here.'

That almost threw Devon back out. The woven-shackled-stream of the Geldor Spire was right there, right there, a veritable sun held in place by shackles of such complexity that it hurt to even consider them briefly. But even bound as it was, the augera was still a force to be reckoned with. Devon could tell that it was very different from the one in the Academy, and from the wild augera by the lake, possessing power on a scale that was entirely above those two.

'Help your friends first.'

The sun-like augera pulsed and its radiance made it easy for Devon to pick out the auric-ambient-flares of Jerric and the twins. They were sheltering in place with improvised shields to protect their physical bodies, but their minds were almost gone. Devon flashed over to them and enfolded them in his new sequence, then gently coaxed them into the arcanic waters where they could be warmed by the augera's presence.

'Now for Caden,'the augera intoned, drawing them all closer to itself. It was like being caught in a current, albeit one that did not threaten to drown. Instead, it posed a different sort of danger — it invited a calm so profound that one could drift off into mindlessness. The augera was doing its best to ameliorate its effect on the four Academy students, but it was still something they had to contend with.

Now that they were properly In the arcanic sea, the corruption within Caden was terrible to behold. His auric-ambient-flare was a broken mess. To Devon's senses, the corruption refused to resolve into something clear. One moment, it was a thorny growth strangling his friend. The next, it was a blight that carved rotten tracks through him. Then, it was a gnawing shadow that stripped off parts of him to consume.

'Help him!' Devon cried to the augera.

'Patience. Be ready.'

'You mean for us to help? But what can we do?' Jerric directed at it, his fear echoing between everyone.

'You can do what you can. May help. May not. But not nothing. Wait for instruction.'

With that, the augera launched into action. Beams of light lanced out of the sun that was the woven-shackled-stream, slicing through the amalgamation of unchosen-sighted-{~?~}-MONSTROUS-HORROR-{~!~} and causing Caden to write in agony. They heard him scream incoherently into the arcana, and distantly, Devon thought he could hear his friend's ragged voice echoing in the Spire as well.

The corruption, whatever it was, seemed to be fighting back. Even as the light of the augera shone, the corruption tried to eat away at the shafts of light. It was impossible for the augera to hold Caden and the corruption in place to work at its own leisure. Instead, it pinned him in place as best it could and struck whenever there was a window of opportunity. It was surgery without anaesthesia in the middle of pitched combat. The augera was methodical and precise, but the situation meant that it could not really spare a thought for Caden even as it worked by sloughing off the parts of his auric-ambient-flare where the corruption had set in.

'You're killing him!' Devon sent, horrified.

'Might die. Might not die. Must continue.'

A little ripple of relief and satisfaction emanated from Lynus at the possibility of Caden dying. Devon rounded on him, but Jerric flashed over and interposed himself between them. 'Not now, Dev,' Jerric admonished. But he also radiated disapproval towards Lynus. Kevan did not react at all. His emotions were inscrutable — he was reining everything in with remarkable control.

Caden's auric-ambient-flare was a bloodied, ragged thing now, floating in the arcanic sea like the carcass of a whale being stripped by scavengers. Entire chunks of it were missing, and still, the augera worked, relentlessly cutting and cauterising.

'Gather,' the augera commanded suddenly, and they were almost irresistible drawn forwards until they were close enough to reach out and touch their broken friend. 'And give.'

'Give?' Devon echoed, confused.

'Give,' the augera repeated, sending a flurry of impressions over them. It wanted everything they remembered about Caden, every fleeting impression, every private observation.

It wanted to stitch him together from their memories.

'How much of him is left?' Jerric asked, horrified.

'He is still unchosen-sighted-{~?~}. But many aspects lost.'

'What do you mean? If he's still unchosen-sighted-{~?~}, then what's been lost?'

The augera's impatience was a scorching heat that made them all flinch away, but it reined itself in. They could tell that it had chosen to do so because it was important for them to understand what was happening, and what it wanted from them.

'Auric-ambient-flares are multi-faceted. Many aspects to self. Some primal, others learned. Some moulded by self, some moulded by others. Bonds of love, bonds of family, bonds of friendship — all shape the auric-ambient-flare, all blend and bleed into it. Not all are primary. Many do not surface as faces of auric-ambient-flare.'

Caden's shattered psyche was suddenly spread before all of them as the augera drew them closer still, and brought them a little deeper into the fabric of the arcana. It was no longer a dark and nebulous body of water — now it was a profusion of threads that ran through reality itself, and the more one looked, the more detail presented itself, threatening to swallow the viewer in vortices of ever-smaller features. Before they could fall into madness by trying to comprehend these infinitesimally fine things, the augera shielded most of it from sight. It directed them to specific layers and threads as it explained them.

It pointed out a lattice that connected Caden to a layer of fabric that was so vast that it spanned the Empire and beyond.'Unchosen-sighted-{~?~} is moulded. Ancient-distant-spiders did not choose him... so he is unchosen. This is undamaged.'

Then it waved them over to a part of him that centred around the memories of his experiences in the Academy, but pointed out how they seemed to have sprouted little roots that sank into every other part of him. 'Sighted, because of exposure. Profoundly changes shape of auric-ambient-flare. Cannot lose sight without losing everything.'

Then, it carefully deposited them on the edge of a thread, and in one vertigo-inducing moment their perspective shifted, and the thread was no longer a slender line. It had opened up into a tapestry of dizzying complexity that, at first, seemed to be nothing more than a random scattering of patches of cloth that had been woven together. But then, after a moment, it was possible to discern some sort of instinctive pattern, some sort of natural sense, to the arrangement of it all. Like looking at the branches of a giant tree and seeing some unknown but undeniable logic in their arrangement.

'{~?~}. Not by his choice, or by conscious design of others. Moulded by the universe. By chance. By circumstance.'

Before they could really understand what they had seen, the augera snatched them out of that layer of comprehension and returned them to more familiar territory, with the pieces of Caden opened up all around them.

'The rest... some damaged but will heal. Some, woven into arcana. May return with time, with chance. Others... gone.'

The augera turned to each of them and tapped them. It was clearly trying to be gentle, but there was too much raw power in its touch, and the knowledge that it was gifting them was almost too much to bear. Their own auric-ambient-flares flowered before their eyes, more intricately detailed and crystal-clear than ever before. The differences between their vibrant, unblemished selves and the fragmented mess that was Caden was thrown into painfully stark relief.

'Give,' the augera said once more, that simple word serving as an invitation, a plea, and a command all at once. 'Give, for his sake. For your sakes. For sake of all woven-shackled-streams. Give.'