192 — Book 4, Chapter 36 — Once Upon a Great Divide

Cale had several questions about the sudden reappearance of the Gift, as relieved as he was to see it. He was especially concerned about what was clearly the presence of divine energy in what should have been a divine void. Something fundamental must have changed in the Black Vault to enable that, and he didn't like the idea that it had happened without his notice.

He was not, however, going to complain that it was now returned. The Gift was exactly the tool he needed to break the stalemate he had with Valev-yetah. Some of the details worried him—something about the Gift sounded different, and he didn't know what it meant for [Sourcefire] to have been integrated with it—but first and foremost, its warning took priority.

His apprentices were here. Cale loved them dearly, but he knew that the moment Valev understood what they meant to him, he would attempt to take advantage of that. It was the sort of man he was. Not cruel, per se, but one who would do anything in his power to win.

With anyone else, Cale might have pretended not to care, so as to avoid drawing attention to his apprentices. The problem with that was that Valev knew him far too well and would immediately see through such a ruse. His only option, then, was to defend them as best he could.

He cast [Barrier-King's Blessing], the spell that would replicate his own barriers across the targets he chose. It was the best protective spell he had, and the only one that had a good chance of slowing Valev down, if he chose to target his apprentices. He hoped not; he hoped Valev would choose to ignore them. He would, if he had any honor left.

But Cale doubted it. Besides, if his apprentices were here for him, then there was no chance they would ignore Valev.

"Cale!" Leo shouted as soon as they appeared in the Black Vault. Valev's eyes flashed at the sound, and he turned toward the apprentices, raising a hand toward them. Cale tensed, expecting a spell, but instead he felt invisible ropes of mana lashing out from Valev's hands and latching on to something in the air—

The link to Utelia. Cale understood what Valev was trying to do almost a second too late. He was keen on revenge for as long as his only option was to defeat Cale and then work his way out of the Black Vault. His apprentices, however, had somehow managed to find their way, no doubt because they guessed that he'd been trapped.

In doing so, they had linked the Black Vault back to Utelia, which gave Valev an escape route.

It was almost admirable, how quickly Valev abandoned his revenge and switched instead to trying to escape. If Cale hadn't immediately figured out what he was trying to do, he might even have succeeded. As it was, he raised a hand and cast a litany of kinetic and barrier spells—[Kinetic Blast], [Universal Blockade], and [Immovable Wall], among others.

Even that might not have been enough to stop Valev if not for the near-immediate reaction from the others. Leo seemed to understand almost immediately what Cale was trying to do, if not the specifics of the situation; he cast [Spatial Recursion] between Valev and the link, causing the astral titan to jitter back a half-step as he fought his way past the spell. Damien raised a great wall of decay and flame, more a pure expression of his power than it was any specific spell. It wasn't enough to slow him down, but it obscured his vision.

Cale wasn't sure exactly what Flia did. If it was a spell she had earned, then she hadn't yet told him about it. Whatever it was, it seemed to harden and crystallize the Abyss itself around the Black Vault, enough to make cross-realm travel far more difficult.

And Syphus, of course, raised its arm and shot Valev-yetah in the face.

Cale watched in stunned bemusement as Valev reeled backward. Other than the transformation of its arm, he didn't think there had been anything magical about the shot. For all intents and purposes, Syphus had just decided to throw a rock very hard at the greatest danger the Great Realms had faced in eons.

It didn't injure him, of course, but it stunned Valev, who had not been expecting anyone to have the audacity to throw a rock at him. That extra half-second it bought them along with all the other spells Cale and his apprentices threw in front of him was just enough time for Seer to make an appearance.

And oh, how the Lost King had changed.

Cale understood how the Gift had returned the moment Seer returned. He took the form of a shadow drifting across the landscape, taking absolute control over any part of the Black Vault that fell into his domain. Even the white splotches of Valev's power dimmed a little beneath his shadow, and though that was a far cry from fully sealing Valev back within the Nothing, it was an indicator of how much Seer's influence and strength had grown.

He had ascended. It was a temporary, forced ascension, of the sort that could happen if a wyldfire mage was on the verge of divinity and given the right amount of concentrated worship—it would last only until that worship ran out, and then the ascended mage would be forced back down to darkwood, their power dimmed until they had sufficiently recovered.

Far in the distance, Cale could sense an enormous ritual circle etched into the ground. It was that which had escaped his notice. Irides was in the middle of that circle, his runelines glowing brightly as he fed his worship into the ritual. Cale was too far away to sense the exact mechanics of that, but he knew enough to understand that whatever circle Irides had drawn must have been enormously complicated.

Artificial ascension was not a trivial magic, after all. There would need to be layers of magical script and complicated runework, each one designed to transform and amplify whatever form of worship Irides had decided on into a tangible expression of power that could be absorbed by Seer's core. A part of Cale was fascinated and wanted dearly to study the circle that had gone into this, but, well.

First things first. Clearly, both Irides and Seer now understood what was at stake and had decided to abandon their respective issues in order to help Cale in the fight. Seer's new status as a god was not enough for him to entirely shut down Valev's magic, for Valev-yetah had transformed himself into a creature far beyond the gods, but it was enough for him to slam the link to Utelia shut once more—to close the door enough, at least, so that Valev could not cross it.

Valev-yetah let out a snarl and turned back to Cale. "Pests!" he roared. "Every time, Cale, you manage to find these little pests to help you with your goals! How many are you going to kill before you're satisfied?"

"You think I killed them?" Cale's eyes darkened. "Be careful about what you say next, Valev-yetah."

"Of course you did," Valev said. If there was any part of him that recognized or feared the warning in Cale's voice, he didn't show it. Instead, there was a bitterness in his eyes, an age-old anger from an argument they'd had time and time again. "You raise them and turn them into little prodigies that eventually sacrifice themselves to save their family or their home or their realm. How many friends have you had that haven't died for one of your causes?

"You could let them keep growing," Valev ranted, pacing across the Black Vault as Cale's eyes tracked him. "You could let us gain enough power to join you in immortal, endless life, but no, you have to be special. You're the only one allowed to have your power. You'd cull anyone else that even approaches it."

His apprentices, thankfully, had recognized the power this crazed mage held—they had each retreated as far away as was reasonable, avoiding the splotches of Valev's domain that stained the Vault. They were close enough still to react and help, but they were taking the threat seriously, at least.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Cale wasn't sure he wanted them here for this conversation, but he didn't have a choice. Besides, they deserved to know, too.

"It isn't worth it, Valev," he said tiredly. It was an argument they had retread a thousand times before Valev had finally gone too far. Before he had slaughtered a whole realm in his pursuit of power that could equal Cale's. "It's not about wanting to be special. It's never been about that. I want nothing more than to have someone else—"

"LIAR!" Valev-yetah roared. The sound of it was anguished, filled with ancient pain, and it was accompanied by a flare of magic that shook the entire isolated realm of the Black Vault. "I gained that power, and you hunted me!"

"Because you slaughtered a realm to do it!" Cale raised his voice. "You knew how I would react!"

"It was already done," Valev said. There were tears running down his eyes, now, liquid magic pouring from starry pools of iridescent yellow. "It was already done. Judge not the actions of the past, but what can be done in the future to redeem them—those were your own words."

"And I stand by them," Cale said. "But even now, you see nothing wrong with what you did. You believe that you could have done enough good to outweigh your crime eventually. That you can eventually make it so that the wholesale slaughter of a realm was worth it."

"You would have done the same," Valev told him.

Cale stared at his old friend, then slowly shook his head. "If there were any other option," he murmured quietly, "I would have taken it. If you were not a danger to the Great Realms—if you were not obsessed with taking enough power to match my own, all in the hopes of some future good you could do to outweigh it—I would have wanted you alive."

He straightened slowly, his eyes never leaving his old friend's. "You are right, Valev-yetah. I have stood in your shoes before, and I have no doubt that I will once again. I have made decisions for the greater good, knowing that some will suffer for that choice, and some of those decisions I would make again.

"But I would try for something better. There is not one fragment of my soul that does not bear the weight of what I have done; not once in all my lives have I made such a choice without spending every waking moment regretting it. Without mourning everything that could have been if I had found another way.

"Your entire philosophy, Valev-yetah, is justified through rigid calculus of good and evil. But you hold no true understanding of either, nor of the many shades of gray between. You do not regret when you kill, because you believe you can save two lives later to make up for it; you do not hesitate to torture one soul, because you can offer endless bliss to another.

"And yet you forget, in all that calculus, to perform the simple addition that would account for all the suffering you would add to the Great Realms in pursuit of this balance. The greater your power, the greater the suffering you can inflict; even if you balance the scales, you have still caused that suffering.

"If you had any regret for the suffering you caused, I could forgive that." Cale glanced up, searching Valev-yetah's eyes. The astral wisp's tears had frozen on his face in jagged streaks of luminescent starlight. "But you do not. You do not consider the consequences of your actions, only whether or not you can balance them later. And when your power is great enough, there will come a time when no amount of good will ever offset the scale.

"You have told me plainly that you feel your actions justified. You would make this choice again, if you felt it was for the greater good. And there is a danger in that line of thinking that you do not acknowledge, a danger that I spend every waking moment dwelling on.

"It was not hypocrisy that drove me to end you, Valev, nor the desire to be the only one in existence with this power. It was not anger, nor fear, nor even a grievance for what you did. It is the knowledge of what you would do—the knowledge that even now, you do not understand why you should not have been allowed to slaughter everyone you needed for the power you desired."

Silence echoed within the Black Vault as Cale finished his speech. The two ancient mages stared at one another, and to Cale, the gap between them felt far greater than it had ever been. He could cross the physical distance in a matter of moments, but the metaphorical one? The gap in their beliefs that they had never been able to bridge?

That was beyond him. All the power in the Great Realms could not change a mind. Not truly. Alter it, certainly; seize it with mana and rewrite its beliefs, absolutely; but he could not force Valev-yetah as he was to understand and agree with his words.

"I will never understand you, Cale Cadwell Cobbs," Valev declared with finality, and perhaps it was to his credit that Cale caught a hint of regret in those words—the smallest fragment of grief over a gap they both knew they could not cross. "But I will not let you banish me again."

"I know," Cale said. There was a hint of sorrow in his voice, too. How could there not be?

Once upon a time, they had been the closest of souls. Cale had once believed Valev's words about following him into the Abyss, across every life. And really, Valev had fulfilled that promise.

But he would never abide by the cost.

Valev-yetah unleashed a new spell—one he had only just constructed, if Cale judged him accurately. He was not a mage that would simply stand around idly while his opponent spoke and monologued; the entire time Cale had been speaking, he had been working on constructing this spell, designed explicitly to subvert Cale's new barriers and to interfere with his connection to the Gift.

It was a domain spell that descended upon him and tore away at his power. There was no projectile to block, no flash of magic he could detect and defend against. Valev knew he had the skill to break down foreign magic in but a moment, if he was only given the chance, so he had made certain that Cale would have as little time as possible to react. This was a spell that would eat through his barriers and bind his soul.

And it might have worked, if Cale had not foreseen that and used that monologue to his own advantage.

The Gift took time to evolve a spell, after all, and it took even longer to evolve several.

[Kinetic Blast] has evolved into [Define Vector (Velocity)]!

[Fangs of the Festering Fields] has evolved into [Planar Consumption]!

[Barrier-King's Blessing] has evolved into [The Wanderer's Demesne]!

It was about time he got a domain of his own. That was the only real counter to another domain, though he had to flood a great deal of mana into the spell to make it. [The Wanderer's Demesne], Cale knew, had been built out of his experiences and his adventures; within it, magic was as he understood, as he allowed.

And he did not allow another domain within his demesne. Valev-yetah's new spell, cobbled together with the magic of the Outer Planes, vanished like a wisp in the wind.

[Define Vector (Velocity)] was an amusing name for an evolution of what had originally been [Impact], but it did exactly what it said. It allowed him to fully rewrite a target mage's velocity to whatever numbers he desired.

Valev had a great many spells designed to trigger the moment Cale tried to push him toward that tear that led to the Nothing, however. If he tried to send him there, several contingency spells would trigger, so Cale opted for something Valev would not anticipate—something he desired, even.

He wanted Cale within his domain. He had accounted for [Reset Magical Canvas] by now, and so the distance between the two was half the reason they had been stuck in a stalemate; Cale had been careful not to let him get close again. Now, though, with the protection of [The Wanderer's Demesne], he would be safe to get in close.

Until Valev found a way around his domain, anyway, but Cale wouldn't give him the chance. There was a reason he needed him close.

"Wha—" Valev was reeling, trying to get his bearings; he managed to stop himself, but only now that he was right in front of Cale. "You fool—why did you—how did you even—you did not have those spells inscribed in your core, I checked—"

Oh, good. Valev was still trying to process. That gave him the last bit of time he needed.

[Planar Consumption] had evolved from [Fangs of the Festering Fields], which in turn had evolved from [Decay Bite]. All three spells had the same limitation: despite the great power they held, they required a physical catalyst to mark the spell.

Cale chomped down around the closest body part he could reach. Valev let out a strange, strangled noise.

But within him, the Outer Plane he had managed to bind began to unravel, and the power he had built the legacy of the Outer Lord around finally began to fade.

"I win," Cale said as soon as he was done, though there was no sense of victory in the words. He stepped back, knowing what would happen next.

Far above them both, Seer gestured, his eyes glowing with the power of the Black Vault, and around Valev-yetah, the Nothing yawned open. Where before Seer's rifts had been simple, jagged scars upon the fabric of the realm, what he manifested now was a gate—a true opening into the plane of nonexistence.

Cale saw it, in that moment. The relationship between the divine void and the Nothing and the God that bridged them both. Seer's existence was a paradox, sustained only by the isolation of the Black Vault and the long line of mages that had spent their lives stabilizing the nothingness within.

And somewhere within that was Darkness, to embody all that had been lost. Once again, a memory stirred.

An instant later, Valev-yetah was gone, and the gate to the Nothing snapped shut.