Divine Apostasy Book 12 - Chapter 79

Chapter 79

They’d lost their pursuers for the moment, and Ruwen gathered everyone into a tight circle. The area they’d entered consisted of massive stone tablets, kind of like the giant pillar in Rami’s mind. These too had text covering them, but he didn’t bother reading any of them. Rami had probably already absorbed it all anyway.

“Remember Malth?” Ruwen started.

“Which time?” Tremine asked.

Ky slapped Tremine’s shoulder. He attempted to dodge it, which struck Ruwen as incredibly funny. Ky was a high-level Shade with insane speed who also happened to be a Grandmaster in the Bamboo Viper Step Clan. The librarian couldn’t have been more outmatched, and yet, he still tried.

Ruwen’s suspicions that Tremine and Kysandra were more than just friends had crystallized into certainty here in the library. Ky was far better at hiding it, but Tremine, with no skills in deception, lying, or subterfuge, was like an open book. Ruwen guessed it was probably exactly how he always looked to his friends.

Tremine rubbed his shoulder and glared at Ky. “Shame on you for beating on an old man.”

Ky raised an eyebrow at Tremine. “Shame is a cage without locks.”

“I hate those Shade rules,” Tremine responded.

“Rules?” Lylan asked. “There’s only one.”

Tremine groaned and Ky beamed a smile at Lylan.

“What about Malth?” Hamma asked, refocusing the conversation.

“Rember the library and that Ink Lord who wanted to torture Rami?” Ruwen asked.

Sift laughed. “Oh yeah, you carried that body around for months. Pretty twisted if you think about it.” He turned to Una. “Can you help him? Our normal Healer has a hoarding problem too, so she can’t fix the problem.”

“My healing doesn’t work like that anymore,” Una said. “It’s kind of the opposite. Like a reverse Healer.”

“Like Jagen’s Blood Tithe spell?” Sift asked.

Only Ruwen’s Divine Perception caught the momentary tightness in Una’s body at the mention of Jagen’s name. Una and Jagen had been separated since everyone’s escape from the Spirit Realm. Jagen had willingly had his memory of Una and the Spirit Realm suppressed so that his God Izac couldn’t rip the information from Jagen’s mind and use it against Una and the others.

Sift stepped back and glanced from Una to Lylan to Echo. “Overseers, witches, and necromancers…I’m walking a dark path.”

“Ignorance blocks the most light,” Lylan told Sift.

“Light doesn’t cure blindness,” Ky added.

The two Shades grinned and bumped fists.

Tremine looked upward. “Goddess take me from this nightmare. I won’t survive two Shades swapping rules.”

Sift seemed confused by the two sayings, but Ruwen didn’t clarify. He preferred the delay, as he didn’t want to reveal the next part of his explanation.

“You mentioned Ink Lord Numarrow,” Hamma said, as if the Shade’s conversation hadn’t occurred.

Ruwen knew Hamma rarely lost her focus. A great trait for a Healer, but it sucked during times like this. “Tremine is positive Numarrow would help us navigate the library and likely allow us to finish first. The more Ink Lords that reach the riddle’s destination ahead of us, the more we’ll need to fight. It’s best if we can make it there first.”

“Can’t Lir help with that,” Rami asked. “Overlord can saturate the library with clones and Lir could piece it together.”

“Lir is kind of missing,” Ruwen said.

“Who’s that?” Lyra asked. “Was he here earlier?”

“Awkward,” Sift muttered.

Ruwen faced Lyra. “I’ll explain more later, I promise. For now, consider him a very smart invisible, and now missing, friend.”

Lyra glanced at her bracelet. “I understand.”

Ruwen hadn’t forgotten the piece of jewelry that was saturated with the Zealot’s high level Soul energy. He also didn’t want to explain Lir because he didn’t one hundred percent trust Lyra yet.

“Even if Lir was here,” Ruwen continued, “I’m not sure we could push the clones far enough away to be meaningful. So that brings me back to Numarrow.”

Sift waved his hands. “Wait. We’re talking about the dead librarian, right? How can a dead guy help us?”

“What?” Tremine said and then fired off a series of questions. “Numarrow died? Didn’t he revive? Did he upset Izac?”

From their body language, Ruwen knew Hamma and Echo had put the pieces together, although only Hamma had the full picture as she knew Ink Lord Numarrow’s current location.

Hamma smiled and held up a finger to Tremine. “It will become clear shortly.” She turned to Sift. “You remember the movie we watched with Grandpa Pine. The one with the pirate.”

“I loved that movie,” Lylan said. “I’d make a great pirate.”

“You would make a great pirate,” Hamma agreed. She refocused on Sift. “Do you remember the Miracle worker.”

“Oh yeah,” Sift said. “The guy married to that witch.”

Lylan narrowed her eyes and Sift quickly continued. “Which is why he seemed so happy. Just like me. Happy.”

 Hamma laughed and turned to Ruwen. “It just so happens our Ink Lord Numarrow is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.”

Now Lylan understood, too, and she stared at Ruwen. “You still have it?”

“Have what?” Sift asked.

Lylan shook her head slowly, her disbelief obvious, before turning to Sift. “Okay, I agree with you. He’s clearly a hoarder.”

“Finally,” Sift said. “It took you long enough.”

“I’m confused,” Tremine said. “What does hoarding have to do with Ink Lord Numarrow? And you said he’s dead?”

“Mostly dead,” Hamma clarified.

At long last, Sift understood. “You never got rid of it. You’ve been carrying around a dead Ink Lord for three years!”

Technically, if Ruwen included the army of zombies he currently had stored in his Soul Vault, he had far more than just a dead Ink Lord in storage.

“What was I supposed to do?” Ruwen asked. “If I got rid of him he’d revive and spill details about us. I thought about leaving him on Rainbow’s End where the revive trigger would never reach Izac, but that seemed cruel somehow. Then, when I didn’t fear Izac anymore, I didn’t know what to do with the body.”

“What about his Soul?” Sift asked, turning serious.

Sift grew up in a Cultivator family and believed the Soul should return to the Universe upon death. He had no interest in being revived and was horrified by the wrapper the deities placed on their Ascendants’ Souls, trapping it in a prison for the benefit of revival.

“I haven’t looked at him since I learned how to see such things,” Ruwen said. He raised his left wrist, displaying the simple dark band there. “This is a miracle of dimensional warping. Even Xavier and Tremine don’t understand the complexity. So I don’t know if time has even passed for Numarrow.”

“Hamma might be able to resurrect him,” Rami said softly.

“How do you feel about that?” Ruwen asked.

Rami bit her lip, and after a moment shrugged. “He doesn’t matter. The Universe if full of the self-serving and cruel. If he can help us, do it.”

“What are you planning?” Tremine asked.

“I’ll fetch Ink Lord Numarrow,” Ruwen responded. “Hamma will try and resurrect him. If that fails Echo will attempt to raise him. I’m pretty sure we never left Earth, and we’re a single gate rune door from Grave. That means pulling him from Inventory will likely trigger the revival process back in Malth.”

Bliz remained quiet throughout the conversation, carefully listening, but he spoke now. “Forgive me if my curiosity is inappropriate or the knowledge is secret or restricted—”

Ruwen interrupted. “Stop it. You know how I feel about knowledge. You’re talking to me like I’m Big D.”

Bliz smiled. “Well, she is scarier than you.” He grew serious. “I’ve always been terribly curious about the process of revival, but the Priests just tell me to pray for enlightenment. Uru forgive me, I’m not the most religious, so my enlightenment never came.”

Lyra subconsciously leaned toward Ruwen, intently listening. Librarians in general were the curious type, and learning such rare knowledge was like offering food to the starving.

Ruwen looked around the circle and found even Sift attentive. “This is my incomplete understanding and believe me when I say the Universe is complicated, so don’t take my words as fact. All of us are using pieces from a puzzle we can’t see and don’t comprehend.”

Turning toward Lyra, Ruwen continued. “On our world we can access many magics, and only recently did I discover more.” He touched his chest. “We all contain a Soul, and it blazes with power. This power faces outward, eager to escape. The Soul also serves as a container for everything that makes you unique.”

Ruwen summoned all eight Chakra gems, and they slowly rotated around him. His Chakras vibrated, quickly synching with each other to create a Harmony. He shivered as cold lightning raged from the top of his head, down his neck and back, and ending at the bottom of his spine.

“Chakras are new to me. Their magic is focused inward and they’re harder to find than one’s Soul. Chakras are related to the Aura, and that Aura is linked to the Soul. A mechanism unknown to me exists that enables Chakras or maybe the Aura to encapsulate what makes you unique. In this way, Chakras and Souls offer the same benefit. When you die, it’s your Aura that carries your Soul back to the Universe.”

“To whom?” Lyra asked.

Ruwen had the urge to bite his nails, something he hadn’t done in years. This question made him nervous as it led to another uncomfortable question—why are we here?

Ruwen glanced at the two massive stone tablets that towered above them, and the invisible presence that always watched them. “For lack of a better term, let’s call our ultimate destination the System.”

“And Ascendancy?” Bliz asked.

“The gods subverted this natural process. During the first Ascendancy, they encapsulate the Soul with their own power and bind it to themselves. Now when an Ascendent dies, instead of the Soul drifting away, it can be reeled in like a fish on a hook. The gods use powerful Temples to recreate the Ascendant’s body based on measurements it constantly keeps. This retrieval process damages the Aura, and most likely the Soul. Some deities limit the number of revivals to ensure the Aura can still fulfill its purpose of transporting the Soul back to the System. Other deities don’t care, and their Ascendants eventually are unrevivable. I assume these Souls never return to the System.”

“Sacrilege and betrayal,” Sift hissed. “A violation of the natural process.”

“You can come back from the dead?” Lyra asked, her words filled with confusion, disbelief, and maybe hope.

“It isn’t always permanent,” Ruwen replied. He nodded at Hamma. “Powerful Healers can resurrect the dead for a brief time after death. I assume it works by rebinding the Soul to its body before the Aura or the Gods’ bindings, activate and pull it out of reach.”

Bliz nodded in understanding. “And this Ink Lord Numarrow is an Ascendant of the deity Izac, but you don’t know the state of his Soul or Aura.”

Tremine pointed at Echo. “What is meant by raise?”

“From the little I’ve learned about Death and speaking with Echo, I think once the Soul and Aura and probably the Chakras now that I think about it, are no longer in the body, powerful Necromancers can raise that body into a state of undeath. Not really living. The closer to death the Necromancer performs this magic the more memories and personality the undead keep.”

Ky summarized the issue before them. “After you drop the body, if the Soul remains, Hamma’s resurrection should work, and we’ll have a perfectly healthy Ink Lord. If that fails, then Echo raises him. If that works, he’ll either be an undead version of the original, personality and all, or a complete vegetable. That all depends on how time passes for the Ink Lord inside Ruwen’s Void Band.”

Ruwen gave Ky a small bow and Tremine nodded at her approvingly. Ruwen glanced around at the rest of his party. Sift looked disgusted, Hamma conflicted, and Lylan interested. Bliz had a distant expression as he processed all this new information. Lyra appeared overwhelmed, confused, and excited.

Ruwen used Chat to speak with Sift privately. I won’t do this if it bothers you too much. I know how serious you take these things.

Sift didn’t respond immediately. He ran his hands through his hair and stared at the colored glass so far above them it was barely visible. Letting out a long breath, he locked eyes with Ruwen and responded over Chat.

It’s not my place to stand in the way of this Ink Lord’s fate. I can only control my own.

Is that a yes?

It’s not no.

That was good enough for Ruwen.

Turning to Hamma she nodded her readiness. Ruwen stepped into the middle of the circle, knelt, and stretched out his arm. Then he summoned Ink Lord Numarrow from Inventory.