Edge Cases

168 - Book 3: Chapter 33: D - Void

Derivan stared at the inky darkness in front of him.

It was familiar, actually. Derivan recognized now that he'd encountered such pure darkness before when they'd recklessly crashed into the dungeon in Misa's bonus room as it was experiencing a dungeon break. It was where they'd first encountered a Reality Anchor.

He wondered for a single, absurd moment if he was in front of the void where Elyra's Reality Anchor was obtained. But no, that didn't make sense; there were none of those strings of light leading up into the sky...

Oh. Oh.

Those strings of light had been the tethers for the anchor. That was the reason he'd seen the image of Misa's village through it that dungeon had anchored that village in reality, their mana crystal offerings no doubt maintaining it. But no one delved it, because no one knew it existed, and so the dungeon eventually broke, monsters flooding out and into the region.

That didn't explain everything. What happened to a Reality Anchor, when its dungeon broke? They'd seen that the one underneath J'rokksur was on the verge of breaking, and the dungeons in the Outskirts had all been broken; if that was any indication, then reality didn't just fade away when the anchor that held it together broke. Instead, the space was slowly corrupted...

...That would explain some things about the Outskirts. If the decay was slow, it would explain why Misa still remembered J'rokksur and everything that had happened to her family, even though others rarely if ever referenced that tragedy. Derivan winced slightly, remembering her rage the first time a Guild member had been entirely unaware of the disaster.

The end of the universe explained a lot. He'd had this thought before, when they were first trying to make their way into Elyra's dungeon. The thought had been almost half-formed, then. Speculation.

Now, looking into that darkness again, Derivan was sure.

Their continent was dying. Every dungeon break brought it a step further. Reality crumbled at the edges, and no one knew.

He should, perhaps, have been afraid to step into the void. The anchors needed to exist outside of reality by their very nature; one could not anchor reality from within it. That meant he was stepping into nothing, and that the nature of that nothing would erode away at him.

Derivan considered this problem for a moment, then drew the mark of Stability on his own armor, in shades of vibrant green mana. The color reminded him of Vex.

Then he stepped into that nothingness.

The Roads had brought him here for a reason, after all.

There was no sensation of falling. Instead, he walked forward like there was still a ground beneath him, though he had to focus on the idea of it if he allowed his concentration to lapse, he felt himself sink down a little bit. He remembered how this space worked; he moved around by thinking himself in a direction.

The problem was... well, there weren't really any directions to move in. He was surrounded by nothing.

Derivan glanced back at the tunnel, already shrinking in the distance, and frowned. He made himself drift back to it, and with a small bit of concentration, allowed a bit of his armor to melt into Slime. His affinity with that stat was increasing every day. He smeared that Slime onto the stone it would ensure he would always be able to find his way back

And then he picked a direction at random, and started drifting.

It wasn't long before things began to change.

What began as pure and empty darkness began to spin into shapes and images impossible ones, to be sure, but shapes nonetheless. They swam through the air like fish...

...and with a start, he remembered when he had encountered this before.

Exactly this.

In a dream he'd had, near to the time all of this had started, when his system had first been broken open.

He remembered the questions.

How are the Bright-Lights, the Not-Dark! The stars, you call them! Do they still spin and turn? Do they speak to the people, bring them joy and terror?

The stars. The voices here had known, hadn't they? The stars had been gone even then, in reality, and Derivan had soon forgotten he had ever heard the word; Vex had explained to him once that dreams tended to quickly slip away, and that seemed to have been exactly what had happened.

The way the voice described the stars, though that was the way they'd seen them in the observatory here, where the stars still existed. They moved. They didn't speak, but...

Belle had told them that the stars had been different once.

That had been far more than just a dream.

What else? He tried to remember.

Bah! What of the Great Kingdom? Does it still thrive?

There was no Great Kingdom that he'd heard of. But if the pattern held, then the Great Kingdom was perhaps something that had been erased, too. Perhaps the void erased things from reality, but everything that was erased was still left here, forgotten.

Or, more likely, slowly rotting away like they were being digested by the nothingness.

Tell me of my children. The thought-forms, the hidden-shadows. Do they fill the skies and forests?

The memory was coming to him more easily, now. This question made him... rather more sad. Derivan knew now what they meant whoever this voice was, whoever their children was, they were gone. Or perhaps lost to the void, too, and they had simply never found one another.

His presence must have been like a beacon of Reality to them, drawing them towards him. He didn't know what it meant that he'd been able to see this place in his dreams.

Perhaps they yet hide...

Derivan hoped so.

Tell me of the conquest of Redle! It must have been a glorious battle.

Impossible! Redle was on the verge of conquering the continent! Has their name faded so thoroughly?

Redle must have been a real kingdom, too perhaps even the Great Kingdom the first voice had mentioned, though this particular voice he remembered as being different. Equally enthusiastic and just as strange, though, to speak one moment of Redle being conquered, and then of them conquering.

But they'd seen time get twisted around more than once. The bonus rooms they had been to were both born out of echoes created by a change in time. Perhaps that voice had experienced more than one, and gotten confused. It certainly sounded confused.

And then there was the final question that he remembered from that dream.

What are you?

At the time, he'd said he didn't know. He still didn't, in truth he was a monster, according to the system, a living suit of armor fueled by magic and given a mind. He knew who he was. His journey with the others had given him grounding in that, and had given him his new Sign, the new glyph that everyone could now use.

But what he was?

That was a question he hadn't answered yet.

Irvis had said they were the same, and that was the closest he'd gotten to an answer. The voice echoed in his mind, now that he remembered.

You will, it said. You must.

There was one way he could get closer to an answer, he supposed. If he could find out what Irvis was...

The shapes in the void were just as solid as they had been in his dream, now. Derivan wondered if he would hear the same voices he had back then, but nothing spoke into his head.

Instead, a figure approached him.

He almost flinched once it came fully into view; it was one of the ant-monsters they'd fought as Misa's dungeon broke. One hand went to his weapon, and the other examined the enemy in front of him.

Except it wasn't an enemy at all.

He relaxed almost immediately, feeling foolish. There was a glint of intelligence in the ant-creature's eyes, and it leaned forward, its mandibles forming a curious sort of click-clack as it watched him. He didn't understand what it was trying to say at all.

It folded its arms and gave him what he was pretty sure was an affronted frown, and then a voice spoke into his head.

Are you new here?

Derivan didn't know how to answer that. "...Yes?" he said after a moment. "But I have been here before."

Been here... before? The ant seemed to puzzle over his words for a moment. You have left?

"I have seen this place once near a reality anchor, I think," Derivan said. "And once in my dreams."

But you are here. The ant seemed to have decided he was just confused. I have seen a few others of your kind here, though there have been less of them of late. The Void takes us all, you understand.

Derivan did not, but he was starting to; a slow horror began to bloom in chest. "I am afraid there has been a misunderstanding," he said slowly. "But I would appreciate an explanation."

The ant cocked its head at him. What do you mean?

"Pretend I know nothing about this space," Derivan said. "Or of anyone within it. How would you explain it?"

Derivan's Physical Empathy allowed him to interpret the ant's frown. We are within the Void, it told him. The hole left behind when Reality dissolves. Anything that has been removed from the world ends up here, where we slowly lose all sense of purpose, and of who we are. Fortunately for us, time doesn't exist here in any proper sense, so it takes far longer for us to be completely erased than it should.

But while we are here... we are gone. Forgotten entirely. You must be quite far gone, to have forgotten even that.

"Is there any way of escape?" he asked. He knew the way back to the tunnel; if he could lead everyone in here out there, perhaps they could simply walk out of the Void.

He doubted it would be that simple, though. It only took a flicker of his senses to confirm he had a reality to him that the ant did not. He could sense himself with Shift.

The ant was like a ghost entirely invisible to that sense. Not that it noticed that he'd tried to check at all.

Escape? the ant snorted, but it shook its head after a moment, giving the question serious consideration. Sometimes... people vanish. We aren't sure why. It's like they dissolve entirely, but they should not be that close to disappearing.

In the Outskirts, the veil between Reality and Void was thin. He understood that now, walking back through his memories at the edges of the continent, where all the anchors had burst, reality was thinner. He could even feel the gradient, whenever he paid attention. The closer he was to a dungeon's heart, the stronger Reality seemed to be.

And when he was in Fendal, where the dungeon's anchor had spread itself thin, there had been an equal feeling of unreality. A strangeness to the people of Fendal that had been not at all unlike the strange behaviors he had observed from his own people, in his own dungeon, so long ago.

The pieces had been there the whole time.

He remembered the way that anchor had taken sapience from the people of Fendal, lifting and transferring it to the people of Teque as though it was a physical property that could be moved from one place to another. That was a deliberate action, but in the absence of an anchor, if Reality and Void started to merge...

Derivan could see it. Fragments of a person slipping from the Void and back into Reality. In the Outskirts, where broken anchors reigned, that would happen the most. It was what had happened to him.

That wasn't what made him feel sick.

No. That feeling came from the fact that he was talking to a creature that looked exactly like one of the monsters that emerged from Misa's dungeon.

He should have considered it before. The system didn't really create things wholesale it always borrowed from something else. And in this case...

How many 'monsters' had he encountered?

How many of them had once been a whole people?

Did the system just... keep remnants of what remained, and use them as templates for so-called monsters?

The sheer scope of what the world might have lost staggered him. The ant didn't seem to notice what was going through his mind it was looking at him with something that seemed like sympathy, most likely assuming he was wrestling with the idea of being forgotten, of being erased from the world.

Derivan had no such worries. He was reeling instead from the idea that he might have been part of a full species of magical creatures, once. What traditions might he have had?

...Was this why Irvis was so angry? Was this the reason for his hatred? Irvis had said they were the same, once. He and Vex had both determined that Irvis was an Aspect, the embodiment of a small part of magic, but...

That didn't mean he had always been that way.

Derivan's voice was steady when he spoke. It was a surprise, even to him.

"Can you take me to them?" he asked, and then he considered the question a little more. "Or... take me to everyone. Everyone that you can."

The ant stared at him dubiously, apparently thinking it was a strange request, but it eventually shrugged. Sure, it said. Not like I have anything better to do.