Chương 93: 3.18 Saturn - Sleeping At Last (4:49)

GravellyVoice1 OH COME ON! Zeke, you already killed Corva. You spent so much time on his story already and you don't need to do any more with it. I know this forum loves the dude, and after you and Foppery proved that he was body-hopping, he's become an even bigger thread for people. But Zeke, you already gave us his tragic backstory. You already gave us the reveal about his family. You already gave us the boss fight where he was killed by Wren and Cole and you. He's dead now. D-E-D. Dead. Finished. He is no more.

He has ceased to be. Bereft of life. If you've got him strolling back into the story to become a recurring villain who shows up every twenty chapters or so to shake his fist at you and promise revenge, I'm uninstalling. BobaFetaCheese Nah. Corva's awesome and he only became that much better when we all learned about all the body-hopping and sociopathic tendencies. Don't listen to Gravelly Zeke. I'm here for it. GravellyVoice1 You're the problem. TwoGirlsOneCuphead Corva is a pretty good villain.

If Zeke is going to have someone stalking him, he could choose worse. Corva is objectively terrible. He's body-hopping, murdering people, manipulating people, obsessed with something, and making terrible life decisions. All that makes him infinitely more interesting than just some rando Black Teeth. He's a genuinely broken person, and that always makes for the best villain. Footballish | that always makes for the best villain. | Agree. 1000% agree. Corva is amazing because he's not a traditional villain.

Think of all the bad guys in the comics. You've got Lex Luthor wanting power and recognition. He wants to prove that he's smarter and better than Superman. Then you've got the Riddler who wants everyone to know how smart he is. Both have flaws that are recognizable in people that we all see. They're understandable as villains. But then you get someone like Mr. Freeze* who is a villain, not because he wants to conquer the world and kill everyone, but because he refuses to let his wife die.

That's soooo much more compelling. He's a tragedy wrapped up with an obsession. The writers of the animated series (who fleshed out Mr. Freeze as a character) took a guy and gave him a sympathetic motivation and followed that straight into monstrosity. He sort of reminds me of Corva in that way. Remember that backstory the dood shared with Zeke and the others around the campfire? Remember his obsession with animancy that popped up when they were in the Valley?

Remember his ability to hop into another person's body and take over? This is a man who's spent decades carrying the grief of losing his wife and daughters. He's not someone who is trying to become the king of the wastelands. He's just a broken man who, through the use of animancy, is probably trying to resurrect his wife and kids. That's infinitely more interesting than a generic bad guy. * How the hell is Mr. Freeze not demanding people call him Dr. Freeze? The man literally has a doctorate in cryogenics.

It's insulting that the Gotham media isn't recognizing that. It's some bosheet. Also, can we talk about the education system in Gotham? It's got to be studied. There has to be something horribly wrong there, because Batman has some of the most educated villains of all-time. Two Face has a JD. Harley Quinn, Hugo Strange, and Jonathan Crane all have doctorates in psychology. Jervis Tetch has one in neuroscience. Poison Ivy is a botanist. The man-bat dude was some sort of scientist. Probably a zoologist or something.

It's crazy that Batman's rogues gallery is so highly educated and yet still obsessed with fighting a guy dressed up like a bat. MoronicMnemonic | Batman's rogues gallery is so highly educated and yet still obsessed with fighting a guy dressed up like a bat. | You've clearly never met a grad student before. Most of Batman's supervillain origin stories make so much more sense once you've spent enough time in academia.

Mithras131 Corva is a clingy stalker yandere who needs to get over someone not being willing to give up their mortal shell without retaliatory stalking and obsession. ClickWhirr I'm pro-Gravelly here, but for different reasons. I don't really care about whether Corva comes back or not. That's not important. What's important is what he represents for Zeke's story. One of the things I always liked about the Fracture-verse is that the setting itself is usually the villain.

You've got fractures, the Under-MIZ, Nexora, corporate bureaucracy, alien contamination, and ecological decay. The world is actively trying to kill your PC and that's what you're fighting back against. It's what makes the games unique. You don't see some dark lord showing up every few hours to remind everyone that he's still plotting things. If Corva becomes the central antagonist for Zeke's fanfic, I think it'll weaken the whole thing. Forty_Forty Oh the GOAT is back, or WOAT?

Since him being a skinwalker lite would probably mean he's the worst. Aaaaand his selfishness ruined any hope for Deadlands solution to weather. Going two for two on the asshat meter. Gagaking So… I'm a bit surprised honestly. I didn't think Corva could instantly get to level 7 in a bunch of his skills that quickly after body hopping (into a presumably non-classed person.) If he hasn't, I'm surprised he was able to beat the witch or destroy her House so thoroughly so soon.

Blazer | I'm surprised he was able to beat the witch | If there's no body then don't count her out just yet. I know we'll see her again. Hell, with Z3ke's luck she is laying low with Patch at his new bar. SignalLoss Patch finally opens his bar and discovers an ancient reality-warping witch living in his storage room. SpicyShoyu | I'm surprised he was able to beat the witch | Zeke's acting like the Blooming Witch is a mid-tier boss and she wasn't. He's always written her as much weaker than she is.

Remember when he had just come out of the House of Seasons and this forum was on his back because they thought he'd somehow beaten her without having access to a class or any skills? Yea. He's always been downplaying her from the beginning. She's an optional boss fight in Frontiers because she's so dangerous and the devs didn't want her bottleneck players. She built the House of Seasons and created all the echoes. She melts faces off and has been the bane of so many PC parties.

She's one of the strongest people in Frontiers. ChickaPop ^Spicy. That's why Corva coming out on top in their fight doesn't make sense to me. When Zeke was first fighting Corva, he'd just gotten his class and didn't know how it worked. I think his melee skill was stuck at Rank 2. He was terrified of everything and surviving on luck alone. And Corva STILL lost to that.

Now we're supposed to believe that same guy walked into the House of Seasons, fought one of the most powerful magic users in Frontiers, and destroyed her home? Z3ke (Original Poster) I'll explain it all to you, but before I do that I need someone to tell me something because the Blooming Witch kept talking about weight and Corva was seemingly obsessed with it and I need to know what it is. She was talking about it like it was important and Corva wanted information about it but I didn't really understand.

So before I get into what happened, can one of you lore experts explain that to me? Because right now I'm completely lost. What the hell is weight? NullSigil Oh Zeke… rookie mistake. You're telling me you walked up to the Blooming Witch and commented on her weight? Women generally don't like being told that they're getting heavier. HecateTeaCozy Wait… I thought you just said that the House had been broken? Now you're telling us that you talked with the Blooming Witch? She's not dead? Why didn't you lead with that?

You got all of us wondering how Corva killed her and she's just hanging around all fine and everything. WTF man? RedRumRedRum BOOOO. I thought Corva actually did something. SolarBUDs Corva didn't kill her. She saw Zeke driving up and detonated her own house. White_Vinegar Zeke: excuse me ma'am, but have you considered a healthier diet? iNtRiCATE-sentience I'm so confused. Is the Blooming Witch alright? Is Corva dead? Did they fight? STOP CREATING MYSTERIES AND THEN REFUSING TO ELABORATE!

Z3ke (Original Poster) I'll tell you all about it after someone starts explaining things. Again, what the hell is weight? HandsWithoutArms | what the hell is weight? | Assuming you don't mean physical weight, then you're probably talking about the old theory making its rounds on the forum a few years back. It was bandied about by a bunch of Emberveil players. It's not canon but it was surprisingly popular on here because it tried to explain a bunch of the weirdness surrounding spatial magic.

Z3ke (Original Poster) I'm gonna need a lot more than that. Try again. Malv0lio Zeke, you're in luck because Emberveil was my game. I spent an embarrassing amount of my life digging through that thing. A little context before we get started. You know all about how classes in Frontiers allow you to level your skills. Well, Emberveil had something similar for magical disciplines. You could specialize in magical schools like invocation, conjuration, warding, and bloodcraft.

One of the disciplines you could choose was spatial magic, and it was infamous. That means it was so famous that it became in- famous. It was notoriously difficult to learn and dangerous to practice. It was the most grindy magical skill you could get and it was very easy to screw it up and, for most of the game, felt very underwhelming compared to throwing lightning bolts at people.

In-game lore was constantly going on and on about novice spatial mages accidentally getting lost between locations or folding themselves inside-out. Or teleporting half of themselves somewhere else. Or opening a gateway into a volcano. Emberveil made it very clear that spatial magic was terrifying. Not only that, but players also discovered that most of the really crazy stuff surrounding spatial magic wasn't available to them.

At high ranks of the skill you could teleport and you could create spatial distortions that butchered giant monsters. You could fast-travel places and you could become a walking natural disaster. But there was always this disconnect between what your character could do and what lore suggested a spatial mage could do. People on this forum brought up the Blooming Witch as an example of what a spatial mage should be like.

She was able to mess around with pocket dimensions and impossible architecture, while our player characters could only teleport around. Obviously, there were limitations with the game engine. The devs couldn't really program in the tippy top of what a space magic could do. You can't build a house and you can't mess with architecture. But then… why would the devs create someone like the Blooming Witch and give her spatial magic if they didn't want players messing around with it?

The Blooming Witch is the expert on Spatial magic. She took it so much further than what a player could do. The House of Seasons is probably the single most extreme example of spatial magic that we've ever seen. But how is she able to accomplish all of that with the same magical discipline available to players? Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. How did her magic work? How was she able to do things that a Rank 10 spatial mage couldn't?

Why was her understanding of spatial magic theory so fundamentally different? That's where we get to ExttraFloppi's Metaphysical Weight Theory. Let me say, right now, that different people use different terms for it. Some people call it weight, some people call it narrative mass, some people call it a soul, and some people call it a blueprint. The basic idea of the theory is pretty simple: everything possesses weight. It's not physical weight, but existential weight. Metaphysical weight.

Whatever you want to call it. A pebble has weight. A knife has weight. A house has weight. A city has weight. A person has a tremendous amount of weight. Weight accumulates. People and places and things gather more and more weight to themselves as time goes by. They gain history, context, connections, and meanings. Think of it like this. A brand-new kitchen knife that you buy from a story has weight, but not a whole lot of it. It's just a random knife.

Now, imagine a kitchen knife that your grandfather carried around for forty years? He used it every day and cooked meals with it. He passed it down to your father who passed it down to you. It's the same basic knife, right? It's the same steel and the same shape. But now, it carries memories and stories and emotions. The physical object hasn't changed, but the weight has. Take that concept and apply it to people. A person has a truly extraordinary amount of weight. They aren't just a body.

They aren't just flesh and bone. They're also memories, relationships, skills, experiences, regrets, dreams, hopes, fears, and so so so much more. A person is every conversation they've ever had, every friendship they've ever formed, every lesson they've ever learned, every skill they've ever mastered. They are every regret, every dream, every promise, every scar, every failure, every triumph, every memory, and every other piece of identity. ALL of that adds weight to a person.

If you want a visualization, imagine a series of lines and dashes. If a pebble looks like this: I And a knife looks like this: IiI And a family home that has been lived in for centuries looks like this: IIiIIi Then a person might look like this: IIIiiiIIiiIIIiiiiIIIIIiiIIIIiiIIiiI People have thousands upon thousands of interconnected threads, all weaving in and out of who they are. They are a vast amount of experiences layered atop one another. That's weight. It's the accumulated shape of a life.

Here is where spatial magic gets weird and where we get the theory that the Blooming Witch was just much smarter than everyone. According to the Weight Theory, spatial magic doesn't move a person or an object. It moves weight. Think about teleportation, a standard spatial magic spell. Most people think that you're moving something from point A to point B. Simple, right? No.

The theory says that teleportation is so difficult because a spatial mage needs to first understand the weight of the object they want to move, then they need to understand the weight of where that object is going, and then they move the weight. Teleporting a pebble is easy because it's just a single thread. Teleporting a kitchen knife is harder because it looks like IiI. Teleporting a house is ridiculously difficult because of its weight.

Teleporting a person is nearly impossible because you're not just moving a body but the entirety of an accumulated existence. A Rank 10 spatial mage can move themselves because they instinctively understand their own weight. But trying to move someone else? Good luck with that. That's why spatial magic is considered one of the most difficult magical disciplines to master. You need to learn an identity and what makes an object itself.

If your understanding about the weight of something is off, then very bad things happen. StoryLeech Interestingly enough, as much as people shit on the theory, the House of Seasons actually supports it. Look at what the Blooming Witch created. It's not just a building that is bigger on the inside. It's also a collection of memories. There are entire wings built around emotional moments. The echoes lived on for decades. The seasons in the wings felt like they were tied to emotions.

Which brings me to what you wrote Elnor said, which was that the House was "scraped clean." I read that and got a chill. If the weight theory is correct - and I mostly think it's just something people came up with to write around how the devs couldn't make space magic too OP - then it means the Corva stripped away the House of its memories, identity, meaning and history. He basically hollowed the whole place out. Z3ke (Original Poster) Okay. I think that helps. Sorta. Maybe.

I'm still not sure I fully understand everything you're talking about with weights and souls and spatial magic, but some of it lines up with things the Blooming Witch said. It all sounds kinda insane to me and I don't fully know what it all means. I think the best thing I can do is tell you all what happened, and then afterwards you explain how screwed I am. Okay. I left off with Jackie looking for water.

I told her that the Summer wing was where I'd found food the last time, so she strode off leaving me and Elnor to explore the House. We walked around and, while we walked, Elnor kept brushing his fingers against everything. He touched a wall or a chair or a painting. When he'd touch things he'd occasionally go quiet for a couple seconds. He'd frown and look confused and once he looked genuinely disturbed. Eventually I asked what he was seeing and he told me that he wasn't seeing anything.

He said there was a difference between what he was getting now and what he'd been able to see when we first got there. Back when he'd been wandering through the pod in the middle of the Janus Storm, it was apparently shoving every little bit of emotion into his head. He'd touch something and suddenly be dropped into entire scenes, whether he wanted to or not. But the House was different. The impressions were weaker and more fragmented and more emotional than visual.

He said it was like hearing a conversation happening a couple rooms away. You could still hear the words, kinda, but it was hard to understand what they meant. What's more, he said there was another layer to the House.

"I can feel the anger and the violence. There was a fight here…" I looked at him and tilted my head because of course there'd been a fight here. I didn't need magic psychometry skills to tell that. Everything around us was broken.

"There's more though. There's some other stuff underneath all that. It feels older. It's… there was grief and obsession. Under it is an older grief. An older obsession. It's not from this Corva guy you mentioned. It was there before him." We kept wandering through the House and Elnor kept touching things but he seemed to be struggling more. It wasn't like when he was in the pod and the emotions and everything were beating the hell out of him. It was more like he was having a harder time picking it all up.

He was straining to touch the memories. A couple times he talked about how they were fading and leaking and dissolving. I didn't really get what he meant. While we wandered, he asked me about Corva. Apparently my reaction to his description of the man was noticeable and he wanted to know who he was. So I gave him the short version. I told him about how I went out to the Deadlands with a group and Corva was working with the expedition.

I told him about his life in a village that got wiped out by a plague and how he'd seen his family die, about him traveling around. I told him how he was obsessed with this weird form of magic called animancy. I told him about how he gave me an ankh and then tried to take over my body and eventually killed Pell. Elnor mostly listened to the story. Half his attention was still on whatever he was sensing from the House, but I didn't get the feeling he was completely ignoring me.

When I got to the body-hopping part, he actually stopped walking.

"What do you mean he hops bodies?"

"He steals them," I shrugged.

"Again…what do you mean he 'steals them?'""I mean he dies. Then he doesn't. He hops into whatever body is closest. Or maybe it has to be a body that he killed with his wooden knives. Or one that is carrying one of the ankhs that he was passing out. I'm honestly not sure."

"That's…that's not how death works."

"Yea, that's what I've been thinking too, but apparently it works like that for him." He just stared at me for a few seconds and I could, once again, see him wondering what the hell he'd gotten himself into. First there was the escape from the Chapel Pit and then the drive into the Janus Storm and the nightmare pod and now we were standing in the ruins of a creepy mansion that had been destroyed by some body-hopping weirdo. Eventually he just shook his head and mumbled something and we kept walking.

We came across the staircase leading up to the second floor and that was one of the oddest moments for me. You remember how it was like when I first got to the House? I got teleported into the foyer and whenever I looked at the stairs leading up my skin would start to crawl. I was freaked by the whole house because it was the most magical thing that I'd seen since coming to this world, but the second floor was so much worse. I knew something lived up there.

I couldn't explain how I knew and I couldn't prove it, but every instinct in me had been screaming that whatever lived up there was not worth meeting. They'd screamed at me to stay away because it was dangerous and deadly. But now, I felt nothing. There was no fear and no pressure and no feeling of being inches away from the mouth of a predator. The second floor wasn't giving off any sort of feeling. It felt empty, like something that had been important had been removed.

I stood at the bottom of the staircase staring upwards while Elnor examined the banister. His eyes were half closed and then suddenly they were open and he was frowning.

"She put them in the wood," he said as he started looking all around the House.

"What?"

"The memories," he said as he tapped the banister.

"This Blooming Witch of yours, she stored the memories in the House." That made absolutely no sense to me but it seemed to do something for Elnor because he became that much more animated. He ran his hand along the marked wood of the banister and started climbing the steps.

"The memories are old. Older than the attack." There was a pause as I chased after him and he just held onto the banister a little while longer.

"I think they're leaking though."

"Uh…what? Leaking? What does that mean?" I felt like I'd been saying that way too much but…what?!

"They're leaking. Like smoke." Again, I had no idea what the hell he was saying. He was being all cryptic and speaking nonsense which, in his defense, I think his mind was still trying to make sense of everything in the House. It's gotta be weird to be getting flashes of memory from objects. We continued up to the second floor and it was, somehow, even worse than the rest of the House. The doors hung from broken hinges, the walls were cracked and morphed, furniture was no bigger than twigs.

One room had a door that was strangely shut and when I reached out to open it I found that there wasn't anything inside. I'm not saying it was an empty room. There was nothing inside. It was just a blank gray void where a room should have been and I quickly shut the door on it and didn't want to think about what that meant. We followed the trail of destruction that wound its way through the second floor. The rooms had been ransacked and the walls had been torn open and the floorboards had been burnt.

I poked my head into a few of the rooms, honestly not even sure what the hell I was looking for. I think at that point I was still just trying to come to terms with what Corva had done to the house. There was a large room at the end of the hallway that we came to and I knew that it had to have been where the Blooming Witch had lived back before everything went to shit. I opened the door and we stepped inside and took in the complete destruction of everything. The room was a wreck.

Tables had been overturned and shelves were smashed and tiny little decorative objects were scattered about the place. There were broken clocks and tiny ceramic figures and coins and bits of jewelry. It was all a bunch of old junk and it looked like someone had emptied a life out onto the floor and then stomped on it. We stepped into the middle of the room and Elnor knelt down next to one of the smashed clocks before he froze.

He'd been reaching towards it, his fingers only inches away, when something appeared and he jerked back. At first I thought I was imagining it. I knew that the echoes had all disappeared. I knew that whatever had happened to the House had broken all of them. But here was one. She was pale and translucent and different from all the other echoes I remembered. For one, she wasn't real. I know that sounds weird and you all might be like "of course she's not real Zeke, she's an echo." But the gardener had felt real.

The father and the sister and the boyfriend had all felt real. They were… substantial. There was something there. They were solid and had a presence. But this echo was different. Her outline was blurred and bits and pieces of her looked like they were dissolving. She flickered and every couple seconds entire sections of her became transparent before slowly reforming. It was the Blooming Witch. She didn't look like how I'm guessing she looks in your guys' games.

You all talk about her like she's some ancient and haggard thing. This echo of her looked the same as the woman who'd come to speak with me after I'd "freed" the echoes. She looked like the woman who'd given me the dimensional storage and then kicked me out of her house. Except, now she looked so much smaller and so much more diminished. She stared into emptiness for a few seconds and it was obvious that she couldn't see either Elnor or me.

It was exactly like the other echoes in the House where they didn't know that someone was nearby. I stepped in front of her and snapped my fingers, hoping to somehow get her attention. Her eyes moved to meet mine and I thought for a second that she recognized me. I thought she'd say my name or ask me why I was back here or demand to know what had happened to her House. Instead, she just looked past me and had this unbelievably tired look on her face.

Her gaze barely focused and she opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. Then she started flickering again.

"An echo," Elnor whispered. I almost jumped. I'd been so focused on the Blooming Witch that I'd forgotten he was standing there.

"You know what this is?" He nodded.

"It's a memory but…they're usually caused by accidents or murders or the like. My old partner used to be able to interact with them."

"What?" Again. I felt like I was saying that too much.

"His investigation skill was higher than mine, and sometimes he'd be able to reconstruct events that happened in a room. He'd create a temporary echo of a memory and ask it questions, but it took way too much out of him and the price was way too high. He only did it twice that I know of."

"Wait, he could create them? And what do you mean by the price was too high?" He looked at me before turning back to the Witch.

"Well, you could sacrifice something that had an emotional…weight? I think that's what he said."

"Weight?"

"Yea. He said some echoes needed something that was the victims. But it needed to be really…emotional. Like a baby blanket or something." He pulled his eyes away from the Blooming Witch echo and looked at me.

"You wouldn't happen to have this lady's baby blanket or something, would you?" I shook my head but… then I remembered what you all said. Back when I had first got to The MIZ and you all complained that I was able to get into the House of Seasons without trading a gilder or any other item that was on the list of stuff. You all threw a bitch fit that I was breaking canon because I was able to get into the House without paying some sort of fee or trading some sort of item. But…

I reached into my dimensional storage space and pulled out the weird offering doll thing that I'd picked up back in the Glens. It was that creepy ass doll with a single thread stretched out as a face and it was ratty and torn and mostly useless. I'd tossed it into my storage space and didn't think twice about it until just now. With the offering doll in my hand I looked over at Elnor and asked "now what?" His eyes went down to the doll before moving back to the Blooming Witch echo.

"Well, my buddy just gave them the doll. He would push it inside them and that would be that." I turned back to the echo and held out the offering doll and, with nothing else to do, I stretched out and pushed it inside the ghostly translucent thing. Something inside the echo gripped my hand and pulled me closer and I felt the doll disappear. The Blooming Witch echo started to solidify and thicken. She stopped flickering and disappearing and the outline of her grew thicker.

I pulled back my hand and Elnor and I just watched as the echo grew more substantial until it looked like an actual person was standing in front of us. She still looked unnatural, but she was so much more… present than the other echoes I'd seen before. She looked up at me and then glanced over at Elnor before her eyes came back to me. Then she smiled.

"It's good to see you again Ezekial."