Chương 1345: 1375 - Lords of Death II

'Stuck…'

"I understand how glum you feel, Leon," Veles said, "but I invite you to consider the benefits rather than the detriments to our condition." Leon leveled a withering glare at the pallid man but waited for him to elaborate.

"I am unsure if the power of life might be restored to us, but in gaining access to the power of death, we have greater options." Leon blinked as something else occurred to him in that moment, but he decided to let Veles make his point first.

"I am 'only' twelfth-tier by magical standards, but the power at my fingertips is the sort that no mortal man can stand against. I walk through mortal worlds unseen, unheard, and with a wave of my hand, I can snuff the life from anyone I choose." Punctuating his statement, Veles raised a hand, and Leon felt an intense pressure build around the extremity like an invisible glove. The same not-power that he'd called upon at the end of his clash with Triton gathered, clear as air to both his eyes and his magic senses.

"You can sense it, can't you?" Veles asked with a wide grin.

"The power of death?"

"Yes," Leon confirmed.

"It's different from magic, but… it's there. I can feel it."

"So few can. You know that my curiosity remains unsatisfied as to how you managed to gain this command over death that we share…" Instead of answering the question, Leon straightened up, forced his trembling legs to steady, and looked around at the gray landscape that surrounded them, bereft of anything colorful and bright and alive.

"Where are we?" Leon asked.

"Changing the subject will only get you so far, my young friend," Veles said. However, he, too, turned his attention outward.

"A transitory place between life and death. It doesn't exist save for when someone finds themselves within it. Our presence gives it form and substance. The moment I take us from this place, then it will cease to be."

"But… it still has to exist in some way, doesn't it? For you to return to it as easily as you seem to be able to…"

"In some capacity, yes. But all of the matter that you see around you, the air that you breathe in, what little light bouncing around us… all of it formed from us. Or rather, from me, as I am the man who brought us here."

"How did you do that?"

"Deftly dodged my questions, yet already digging for information?" Veles approached Leon straight-faced, almost angry, and Leon came within a hair's breadth of flinching when he suddenly grinned and clapped Leon on the shoulder.

"Those few whom I've met who also know death have been much the same! It seems that only a very rare sort find themselves in our peculiar circumstances…"

"Others, then. Are they still… alive? You are… we are… still alive, yes?"

"As much as we've been able to see, yes, we are still alive. You, perhaps, more than me. You, after all, still walk among the living, seen and heard." Leon sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. It occurred to him that he needed a haircut as he'd been focusing entirely on the war for the past few months. That errant thought did little to distract him from the mountain of questions that speaking with Veles was giving him.

He lamented his Ancestors' current absence, keeping them from giving him their invaluable perspectives. He guessed that this might be a novel experience even for the Great Black Dragon…

"I have so many questions…" he whispered.

"While thinking them over, might you finally satisfy some of my curiosity?" Veles pressed.

"I so rarely find those who share my affliction, and I'd rather not start any relationship we might build on the wrong side of the veil between life and death…" Though the pallid man gave him a muted smile, Leon sensed iron in his words and knew that he was going to have to give a little if he wanted to get anything.

"I… apologize for my hesitance," he said slowly, almost forcing the words past an unwilling tongue.

"This is… overwhelming… and it touches on aspects of my being that I… that can be vulnerable…"

"No one likes revealing too much about themselves to strangers," Veles said as he gave Leon some physical space and sat on a rock, partially turned away.

"Take your time. Just know that even a little bit of reciprocity can mean the difference."

"The difference between what?" Leon asked as he sat on another rock and directly faced Veles. Veles smiled.

"Between everything …"

'Between getting my own questions answered and not …' Leon sighed and decided to just take the risk.

"When I fought Triton, he used a rune on me. It somehow severed me from magic. My Ancestors were struck by another rune, and with me cut off from my magic, I was rendered helpless…

"It was then, when I was seeing Triton cut his way through my allies, that I felt… something. It was power, yet not the kind that I had ever experienced. It had been with me for so long that I had completely missed it; it just… faded away into the background. I can't give you a particular point where this power found me, but I… have a few suspicions…"

"Such as…?" Veles pressed, though he remained turned slightly. Leon frowned, considering just how much he wanted to reveal. The Iron Needle was, he thought, the most likely culprit for this power, at least in an active sense. The Heartwood seed was the most likely source, but he couldn't use that power until finding his Universe Fragment. And yet…

if that were the case, he thought he might have noticed something different, something more like this power of death, either after mastering the Iron Needle or first using his black lightning. That he couldn't remember anything particularly different from that, he guessed that the Heartwood seed was the one most responsible for this predicament he now found himself in.

It had been in his soul realm for centuries, its cold power seeping throughout his soul realm unnoticed, until the moment when he finally called upon that power, and the seed took root.

"A Heartwood seed…" Leon whispered, his eyes closing as he allowed the words to pass his lips.

"Black, and cold as ice…" Silence answered him, and when he opened his eyes, he found Veles staring at him, mouth agape, his black eyes wide as dinner plates.

"A Heartwood seed…?" he asked.

"A black Heartwood seed?" Leon nodded in confirmation, and Veles sucked in the stagnant air of this dead land and let it out in a protracted sigh. His eyes slid from Leon and went to the middle distance, his mind visibly focusing on nothing but his own thoughts. Finally, Veles said, "You are… a profoundly lucky man, Leon Raime…"

"I know," Leon quietly responded. His luck had brought him far, though in this particular case, he would have given the black seed in a heartbeat if it brought back his father, as he speculated it might have if he'd given it to Artorias instead of the gold seed.

"When I called on the power of death," Leon continued, "the seed… took root in my soul realm…" Veles turned slightly more toward Leon, his eyes narrowing slightly.

"That is… I have never heard of that before… though it leaves me with another question: I have seen you use black lightning before, and it bore the unmistakable traces of death. You were able to call upon this power before, but it was only this time that caused the seed to take root? Do I have that right?" This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. It was a battle of immense magnitude for Leon to keep his face straight, but he managed by the skin of his teeth.

"Yes. I… the black lightning was something I… I suppose… it's something that I found out I could use decades later. It's always injured me to use, though, which has significantly hampered my ability to study it." Veles frowned, clearly not entirely convinced by Leon's answer, but after several silent seconds, he appeared to accept his explanation, if only for the moment.

"It's a great struggle for the living to control death…" the pallid man finally responded, though the words seemed aimed more at himself than Leon. More directed to Leon, he added, "After this, you might find yourself with a greater command over this power. Though I would keep an eye on that seed. There are certain implications in it taking root, ones that I am not yet willing to share, if only because I'd rather not be proven wrong.

Regardless, if your usage of any death-related power causes the root to sink deeper, or for the seed to grow into something more … Immediately cease all use of the power. You yet walk in life, and that is not something that you should throw away so casually."

"I might become more stuck if I do?" Leon asked.

"Like you? Ah, no offense, I just meant—""It's fine," Veles said with a wave.

"Yes, like me. Caught not just between the powers of life and death, but between the Kingdoms of life and death, as well." Leon curled up slightly, getting more comfortable on his rock.

"Could you tell me more about that? Death, I mean."

"Hmm. I suppose I can. It intersects well with my own story, if you'll indulge me; I so rarely find myself able to have a conversation that I'm feeling rather talkative…"

"Please," Leon said. Veles sighed deeply as he considered where to begin.

"I'd start at the beginning, but I fear that the beginning is not the beginning. So… hmm… Then I'll start with my own story, and branch that into the truth as I understand it.

"I was born into a different world than this one." Seeing the look on Leon's face, he quickly added, "Not in the sense you might be thinking of—I should say that I was born into a different age than this one, one ruled by gods rather than men."

"The Primal Gods and Devils?" Leon asked.

"Yes," Veles confirmed.

"Don't hope for much from me about that time, however; I was no great player in that time, and it was during Khosrow's age-ending rebellion that I found myself most afflicted by my current condition and unable to intervene in the war." Leon lightly grimaced and quietly waited for Veles to continue, which the man almost enthusiastically did a moment later.

"In my youth, I found myself falling in with a certain group of scholars and philosophers who thought that many worlds intersected with this one. They wondered what might lie beyond the edges of the universe, and where souls went upon the body's death. They wondered how life came to be in the universe, reasoning that there must have been a time before even the Primal Gods and Devils, before the Great Dragons flew through the sky, before the Sun-Clawed Lion had carved the first stars into the Void."

Leon, though he remained quiet, wondered if this was the cult that the Thunderbird and Great Black Dragon spoke of.

"Of course, the Primal Beings and Divine Beasts were asked, but in their arrogance, refused to even entertain the questions these scholars brought them. By the time I joined this order, we were thoroughly on our own—rather, it might be more accurate to say that we were persecuted by the Primal Beings for seeking such knowledge. That, as you might expect, only convinced us that we were on the right path, that our suspicions and hypotheses had basis in reality.

There were many stories of cover-ups and conspiracies back then, all relating to how the universe came to be, and all because it was so clearly something that we were not meant to know! If I recounted them all, we'd be here until the universe's end!

"Such a state of affairs couldn't last. The Primal Gods and Devils thought us so great a risk that they banded together to wipe us out. But… in our final year, we entertained a particularly important guest, one who came to us in secret in search of truth…" Veles became wistful, his dull black eyes finally finding some sparkle as he whispered the name.

"Khosrow." A name that could shake the earth, a man who had torn down the old way of the universe and built a new one, only to die at the culmination of his great endeavor. Especially given Khosrow's history with the Thunderbird, Leon, in this case, treated his name's utterance with as much gravity as Veles did.

"I wasn't important enough to meet him," Veles said, "but I saw his coming. He was already starting to make waves, though he hadn't yet become the Khosrow that would remake the universe, for better or worse. I'm sure you have your own opinions about him, given your particular ancestry." Leon gave him a bitter smile, and Veles, satisfied with that answer, pressed on.

"The future Great Lord stayed with us for a month. A year later, we were no more. The Primal Gods and Devils, their powers combined, were too much for us to fight off. I… I was most interested in death. In the process of it, in how it is different from life. In how so many powerful mages seemed to believe in the afterlife, and in how similar so many of those beliefs turned out to be. When the Primal Beings came to bring us our end, I… made my greatest mistake.

I thought to save us with a ritual that brought together all that I had learned of what I had studied. Instead, I unleashed death indiscriminate and hurled myself and many of those who were defending my order into the beyond. I opened a door that should have remained closed, and if they hadn't had to struggle to close it and repair my mistake, my order may have survived beyond me. And even my survival is debatable!" Veles laughed morosely, losing himself for a moment in memory before continuing.

"That is how I became what I am. Or rather, how I started on that path, as I have managed to claw myself back to some semblance of life, though only so much that only those who have touched death themselves can see and hear me. So, allow me to pause my own story, though I can tell you have questions, and dive into the true beginning: the beginning of everything.

"You see, my young friend, in becoming what you see before you, I became privy to what was discussed by Khosrow and the leaders of my order—of the questions he had, and the answers they gave. Not all of them, but some …" Leon cocked an eyebrow, and he found himself wondering how much was discussed.

'Did Khosrow go to them seeking their knowledge for his war? Or did they answer his questions in a way that led to the war?' He kept those questions silent for the moment, hoping that Veles would answer them himself.

"That central question of what was before the universe we now inhabit was core to their discussion," Veles explained.

"Khosrow came to them asking if there was a time before the Primal Gods and Devils—a question he seemed to be asking many different people during this time, if I understand his muddy history correctly. He asked many questions, and my order answered as best as we could.

"Before there was anything, they told Khosrow, there was everything. All possibilities, all existences, everything and nothing, all at once. The universe was everything, all folded into and throughout itself—a universe exclusively made up of what could be.

"But at some point, what could be became what is and what is not. Everything that you know and see is a result of what is. Everything that you can imagine is what is not. I do not know what may have prompted this change, but the answer, as I understand it, satisfied Khosrow. It was his first question upon arriving, and his last before leaving.

"Being now connected to death, I can elaborate a little on this. Death and life were both possible, existing in harmony in that boundless age before the Primal Beings. Life won out when what could be became what is, but death did not disappear entirely. Instead, it was… shunted off to the side. Apart, but still a part. The boundary can be crossed, but only one way. Two worlds, one of life, and one of death, only just barely intersecting." Veles smirked and gave Leon an almost mischievous look.

"I hope you understand why that information only intrigued me more." He then sighed and leaned back.

"I have met several others who have known death in my time, though none were able to restore me to life. None were able to help me break past that seemingly insurmountable barrier, to remove myself from the remove I found myself in…" Leon finally interjected with a question he'd been dying to ask for a while now.

"Is that your goal? To return to life? As you explained it, the powers of life and death can't be used together. One must be 'chosen', and the other forsaken, isn't that right? Could you… give up death? Would that allow you to return fully?" Veles froze for a long second, then turned fully to face Leon.

"You are only the second person ever to ask me that. Granted, you are only the fifth person I've been able to speak with since I threw open the gates of death myself, but…" He chuckled at some unspoken joke.

"I… do you ask for yourself?" Leon shrugged noncommittally. Curiosity had given the impetus to ask the question, but he did want to know if he could somehow give up this death power and commit himself to the 'power of life' as they'd been calling it.

"That is… not something I can answer, though you may be of some help in that regard. My affliction does not stem from a black Heartwood seed, so I don't have a convenient seed to uproot—if that's even safe to do. I would honestly say that it is not safe, but you can try if you so desire.

"But to give up the powers of death for a proper return to the physical world… I have contemplated that many times. Would I give up all that I have now to regain what I've lost?" He chuckled again, though seemingly more at himself than at any private joke this time.

"My answer changes depending on the century. Suffice it to say… I cannot do so, no matter my answer. If you're looking to somehow forsake the powers of death… I will not tell you it's impossible, but I will say that I cannot help. Nor, honestly, would I want to. I want to understand this, to know more, not to abandon it because of its inconvenience. And in time… I believe you'll see your situation similarly…"

Leon smirked, not quite convinced, but at least willing to entertain the idea of wielding this power instead of more conventional magic.

"I suppose I can stop my story for a moment," Veles said.

"You look like you have questions…"