Wish upon the Stars chapter 894

Reversing the process of converting the formation into a void shallow was time consuming and complicated. Back in the dungeon, the thing had been old and established, which was what made it stable enough to use the mist as a carrier to spread across the entirety of the screeching shoals. This one was much more recent and much less solid, so it COULD be reversed, but doing so required Callie to play with the Void in a way I really didn’t like.

Void was…complicated. The way Callie explained it, it was a spiritual as well as a physical contagion. The void wasn’t just an underlayer of reality, it was kind of an inversion. The Void Children and their corruption was similar to renown, but kind of the opposite. They were gods, and they harvested the spread of that contagion like normal gods did renown.

At its core, renown was faith, belief, it was the force that codified the universe, sheer force of will shaping reality. The void was the opposite. Despair, hopelessness, that was why the mist had worked the way it had.

This was a problem for humanity, because like the house thing had said, it meant renown was incompatible with void beings. Namely, it was LOUD. The Void was silent and empty, despairing and deathly still. The Void’s despair and hopelessness was entropic, degrading all things positive, and the Void itself was the same way. It was, in a sense, anti-space, and when it intruded into REAL space, the actual positive spatial energy it came into contact with sort of…decomposed.

Callie, interestingly, could reverse this process. The Heretic Flame protected the soul, and space seemed to involve spiritual aspects of the actual universe. She tried to explain that part, but I had absolutely no clue what she was talking about, so i just smiled and nodded. My own research and understanding of things like mythology and skill construction was complicated enough, Callie could have the Void stuff.

Regardless, the issue we were running into here was that while the heretic fire could repair void damage (and therefore seriously disrupt void CREATURES, since the Void corruption was what they were made of) the corruption of the spatial energy was an order of magnitude higher than the kind of stuff that happened to living or even Void beings. This was a natural mechanism of reality, with the Void and the universe being DESIGNED to work in tandem.

Which meant in order to cleanse the Void energy from this shallow, she needed to take command of it and guide it back into the Void itself before she could begin using the heretic fire to repair this place.

Naturally, we didn’t want to deal with a bunch of people underfoot while she did it, so we sent the majority of our forces off to keep finding golden spheres. Despite this major problem, I wasn’t expecting special treatment from the elders. They didn’t like me, and if I gave them an excuse to suppress me they would do it. Wasting potential points to work on this was going to be a net loss for me, no matter how you sliced it.

Beyond that, our suspicion that someone in the WCP was working with the Void made it dicey to rely on anyone up in the station. I doubted those high and mighty figures were sitting around watching us walk across forests or stop to rest. Chances were there was someone in charge of monitoring, and they were cutting together a highlight reel or something. That kind of position would be a key failure point for a mole to exploit, and my luck was bad enough that it was safer to assume that was the case than not. If it wasn’t we didn’t lose anything, but expect the worst and you’d never be disappointed.

Which was why Callie and I were now standing, alone, in front of a strange rift in the air. It looked…sick. Like the world had an infection. It was hard to see, really, strange ripples that twisted the air in unhealthy and disgusting ways, but only if you looked close enough.

If I used Dantalion, I could feel SOMETHING seeping out of it. It wasn’t exactly the same as the mist, it was more ephemeral. It was the sensory equivalent of catching a dark form out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned to look nothing was there. Only it was out of all the corners of my eyes, and it was making me feel suffocated.

Subconsciously, i called the heretic fire through the bond, coating myself in the stuff. The sensation faded,  but didn’t disappear. Callie smiled at me sadly. “It’s uncomfortable, I know.”

“Not to you,” I pointed out. I could feel that. I didn’t love it.

She shrugged. “It’s…soothing. It makes me feel like resting. Like white noise or rain sounds. It’s my Path. of course, I also think the fact that it can’t hurt me helps. I have the heretic fire coursing through me constantly, like I promised. I’m only susceptible to the positive aspects. And YES, there are positives. The Void is a natural counterweight to existence. It’s not NICE, but it’s necessary, not to mention useful. Void travel is one of the key reasons the vanished gods have managed to keep up with the six.”

I knew that. I’d experienced it myself. In retrospect, that first transport on Rackham had been the initial clue that the vanished gods were colluding with the void.

“So, how do you…get rid of it?” I asked after a moment of thoughtful silence.

She reached out, and her pupils expanded, filling her whole eye until it was just a pool of black, shot through with brief, disturbing flickers of blue grey. Her fingers twined in the sickening spatial currents, and she started to pull them. Not all at once, a bit here, a bit there, it reminded me of someone trying to untangle a big pile of chords. Slowly, she freed up a…strand? Then another, then she started to weave them together.

Her expression was strained as she slowly untangled and then reworked the strands. Callie had sensed the Void many times, and had communed with CREATURES, but actual Void Manipulation was not something she’d done before. In realty, she was cheating, using hwe Shadow Manipulation and her Path at the same time. Callie had been Manipulating shadows for years now, and had used her Abyssal Path through those for a long time. She told me that in some ways, the Void was like reality’s shadow, and that using that imagery, combined with her Path, made it feasible, if difficult, to capture and adjust it.

Seeing how exhausting it was for her though, I decided to help her out. I put a hand on her shoulder, then reached through the bond and used Dantalion through her. I made sure Leviathan was active before starting, because I wasn’t sure what a deep analysis of the Void would do to me, but I focused on letting my information gathering form slowly churn away, the analyzing power slowly sinking deeper and deeper.

Through Callie’s senses, I saw able to get a foothold into analyzing the Void. In some ways, it was the same as analyzing reality, but backwards. Still, it was exhausting and difficult, and it kind of hurt.

With the additional feedback though, Callie’s ability to manage the void became smoother. She could have done something like that herself, but it would have meant lowering her guard and accepting in the Void influence, which neither of us were willing to let her do. I’d rather take a little pain than put my wife at risk of being turned into a psychotic Void puppet.

Finally, she triggered several parallels with Piece of Mind, stacking them together to help offset the load of freeing up and maneuvering the strands.

Rather than tie it in a ball or something, Callie used the Void stuff to create a simulacrum of a person. Specifically, of the house girl. Her shadow clone ability could be used on others, though it was less effective without a ton of very specific data. But this didn’t need to be combat ready. She was just hoping the form would buy us a few seconds of confusion once she pushed it back through the tear that the influence had been seeping from.

It took about four hours to do it. She had to individually weave the muscle fibers, which we based on the muscle suit the girl had been knitting, in order to make it dense enough to fit all the influence into that one form. Once she finished, she commanded it back through, and the construct turned and walked casually into the tear.

Once it was gone, she took a deep breath, then held out her hands and focused. Blue black flame flared off her as her wings spread, and she focused her intent though the fire, sending a torrent of the stuff into the tear. It hit the strange crack in the world (which I’d been able to kind of reverse echolocate through the corruption I’d been helping her sense) and clung, coating the tear.

It started to close, but slowly. I had an idea. This stuff was partly made of Leviathan, which was made of Zagan, for the purposes of soul repair and protection. It was good at protection, and apparently the repair was a unique ability, but my own soul repair ability was faster if more specialized. I triggered Zagan, then offered her my own fire through the bond. I felt her draw it, and there was a flash of green among the blue and black.

It was like pouring hot oil onto an open flame. The green flames caught and were consumed by the blue, burning away but speeding up the process. It took less than ten minutes for the rift to be burned away, sealed completely, and Callie collapsed backwards in exhaustion when it was done. I caught her, obviously.

I lowered her to the ground, setting her head in my lap, using her cloak as a pillow since I was in armor. “You ok?”

“Yeah,” she panted. “Sorry, that was a lot.”

I smiled softly. “Worth it though. Take a look.” I gestured to the forest around us, which had changed. As she’d removed the void taint and then healed the breach, the healing had radiated out in a strange inversion of the way the corruption spread. All around us, leaves bloomed on previously black trees, grass grew where they had only been barren earth,  within a minute or two, the clearing turned from a blasted wasteland to a picturesque forest clearing.

I’d condensed all the ash from that lake into a hard casing to get it out of the way, and when it was purified and reversed, the poison fire had somehow inverted too. Something about the Zagan purification power had erased the toxicity AND the flame, and purifying water had sprung up from the cracks in the rock filling the lake within moments.

“I…I didn’t even know I could DO that,” I said as I stared at it. “Did you know I could do that? Or maybe I can't. Purification plus Void is inversion? But like…good inversion? I wonder if that’ll be what you can do once you combine your ability with the trait?”

She hummed absently, and I looked down to find that she’s drifted off to sleep. I laughed, lifting her head to adjust my legs. I’d been sitting on my feet and if I was going to be here a while I didn’t want my legs to go numb, I crossed them, then set her head back down and just settled in to enjoy the view.

While this didn’t solve any of our major problem right in this moment, the fact that the two of us managed to do this, something probably no one else on this planet could have done, made me pretty hopeful about managing Callie’s condition. As for the Heretic God…well, I’d have to contact my grandparents to look into that. I had a feeling that was going to be a new and y complicated factor, but it was better than the alternative. We were safe (for some value of that word), we were together, and we could handle anything. Things could definitely be worse.