Chapter One Hundred and Thirty Three - 133It was late, and the halls were only filled with a bare minimum of light. Conjured magelight sat atop tiny sconces, each one worked from a reddish metal with a small white yellow light glowing in a near perfect orb. Felix could pick out tiny sigils etched around where the sconce met the wall, and again around the indented portion below the floating orb.
He saw the markings for light and for circle, but the sigaldry got more complicated from there. Felix also spotted force and what looked like diffusion or something similar. He was leaning on his Skill for the brunt of the identification, those bits and pieces of knowledge that seemed jammed into his brain by advancing Sigils of the Primordial Dawn. Following the patterns and flow of the sigaldry was easy, but parsing exactly what it was doing was another thing altogether.
It's likely drawing power from...ah yeah. Felix's fingers found a small, misshapen orb beneath a metal panel. It was about the size of a pea, and glistened with white and yellow light. A tiny monster core. Why not draw on the ambient Mana?
Felix could sense a great deal of Mana floating in the air, exuded like breath from everything around them. Why wouldn't a simple device like this pull from that source? It was thick as soup, yet as transient as the thinnest cloud. Mana was weird. The nature of it eluded him, but that was another purpose for his walk.
Quickly, Felix and Pit found their way back down to the parlor and opened the door. Within were the numerous built-in bookshelves chock-full of tomes of all shapes and size. A fire still crackled in the hearth, and his sharp eyes picked out Zara, still in her seat.
"The strange one is back," piped a voice before a flutter of wings announced the jewel-colored kingfisher. It alighted on a small side table and regarded Felix and Pit with a dark eye.
"Uh, good evening, Keru," Felix said, not quite sure how to greet the little bird. He settled for a tiny wave before shifting his attention to Zara. "I've slept enough for today, so I thought I might do some reading. Would that be okay?"
Zara stood, gracefully, as she had done everything else. "Reading is well and good, but I feel you have other questions that I may answer more directly. Hmm?"
Felix inclined his head.
"Tell me about Chanter magic."
Two men, minor nobles by their dress, stumbled down the Boulevard of Rising Truth on the outskirts of the Sunrise Quarter. They clung to each other, as if both were afraid of drowning at sea, their teetering forms only contested by their rambling, slurred conversation.
"Merrik, you know, Ostwin's boy? Says he's lookin for a---" the darker one belched. "--new breed a defenders. Fer the Wall."
"An' you're thinking of volunteerin'?" The other fixed his friend with an unsteady, watery eye. "You can't hit the broad side of a, a, what do they call em? A horse house."
"Pony palace."
"Stables," the lighter one finished. "Pony--? The Wall! Next you'll say you wanna wade into the Foglands itself..."
The darker man pulled himself straight, though his shoulders wobbled with the effort. "I'm a blooded citizen of the Heirocracy, Sellens. We've a duty."
"To die to monsters?"
"To fight to--to defend our way of life," the man's thatch of dark hair was frizzy with the summer humidity, but he smoothed it down as best he could. "To be a hero."
"A hero," a patch of shadow whispered, and both men nearly tripped over themselves. A lithe form materialized from the darkness, patches of light fleshing out into a shapely woman with full red lips and tight armor. "I could use some heroes, right about now."
Hands like claws of darkness reached out and gripped their doublets, bringing them both to their knees without any effort at all. A face half covered in a black mask loomed from the shadows, and those red lips smirked with contempt. The two men couldn't scream, couldn't breath, as if her hands gripped their hearts instead.
"Muster your courage, heroes, and tell me everything you know about this damn street. Or else you'll find that monsters are far closer than the Wall."
Keru let out a shrill note and fluttered over to a bookshelf. Pit echoed it back at him, but kept his much larger form still. The kingfisher trilled again, going deeper by an octave, and Pit copied it exactly.
"What are they doing?" Felix asked.
"I've learned not to ask," Zara said with a sharp smile.
The two of them were sitting in chairs facing one another. Zara had, at some point, found a chair made of Avum leather and had placed it the only place furthest from the hearth. His discomfort with sitting in chimera leather, close cousins to Pit, had been noted and acted upon in less than a few minutes. How she had known he'd come back here was a mystery he didn't bother to unravel; Felix had far bigger questions than that.
"As I was saying, all of creation is music." Zara said this and, very faintly, Felix could hear a distant echo to her words. Like they were reflecting off something both nearby and impossibly distant. "The mythology of the old gods says one day a great song arose from the Void, a powerful, primal surge of complex tremors that competed against one another for dominance. Yet they were too equally matched. Instead of dominance, what was established was a powerful balance, a harmony of chords that echoes to this very day."
"But what's the real story?" Felix asked.
"Truth lies in all stories, whether they be legends or histories. Just as all records are tainted by the perceptions of those who write them, so too are they informed by some intrinsic truth that cannot be purged." Zara spread her hands. "The real story, is that the Grand Harmony has existed for all of known time."
"And how does a Chanter work into this?" Felix drummed his hands on his thighs. "How would I tap into this power?"
"That you have sensed it, attuned yourself to it, speaks well of your progress, Felix. To reach deeper however, one must come to an understanding with the Wild Song. Immerse yourself in its flow. Listen to the rhythms of the world, the vital vibrations in our very souls and in everything around us. Then, when you grasp the fundamental truths you seek, it is restructured, turned to a new purpose by our Will and Alacrity."
"Mind over matter?" Felix asked, somewhat skeptically.
"If you like," Zara shrugged. "Mind over Spirit, over Body, is perhaps more accurate. To be a Chanter is to harness the Chant, which is, simply put, a codified set of rules for moving the Grand Harmony to your Will."
"So a new power source? Independent of Mana and Stamina?" Zara nodded and Felix chewed the inside of his cheek in thought.
"Don't mistake me, boy. It's not an infinite resource. The amount you can accomplish with the Chant is equal to the strength of Mind and Spirit you can bring to bear."
Felix's thoughts skipped a track as questions raced through his brain. He leaned forward. "What is the Void?"
"The Void...it is the absence of creation. And yet it birthed our reality, if the myths are true. It is the flipside realm to this, the Corporeal Realm. Some, in their wisdom, have called it the Cognitive Realm. I question the soundness of their own Minds, however, to so closely relate a representation of 'nothing' with cognition." Zara shook her head, her eyes flitting across her bookshelf.
The Naiad's description matched the old sage's mad ramblings, back when he'd been stuck within the Void. He had said the Void was the space between the Minds of gods. Cognitive Realm, huh?
"Then what of the Desolation?"
"How do you know this word?" Zara's voice snapped, like a flag in stormwinds. Felix even felt a jolt of fear at her bright blue gaze.
"Let's say I'm well-traveled," he managed. Zara was quiet a while longer, long enough that Felix began to feel uncomfortable with the silence. Yet just before he spoke up, she sighed.
"The Desolation...it is the confluence of all things. The meeting point between the Cognitive and Corporeal. Ethereal, one might say," she clucked her tongue. "But these are academic subjects. They are useful for conceptualizing what we consider the Grand Harmony, but are not intrinsic to it. They lie outside the Wild Song."
"So what is the System, then?" Felix leaned forward again, his hands on his knees. "If the Void and the Desolation are beyond the Grand Harmony, then this whole magic music seems to lie outside of the System as well."
"It does, which is one of the reasons it is so reviled by those in power. The System empowers and establishes a set order to the world. The Wild Song disrupts that; anyone with the knack can access it's might."
"Why don't people teach everyone they can?" Felix asked.
"It's harder than you might think to access and harness the power of the Wild Song. Hard on the Body, on the Mind, on the Spirit itself." Zara let out a little growl from the back of her throat. Felix felt the heavy weight of anger and sadness pulse out from her for only a moment before it vanished. "And it's doubly hard to survive exposing yourself to someone who, with but a word, could end your life. An entire phalanx of Inquisitors waiting in your home, perhaps informed by someone you thought you had trusted. Inquisitors that will end you, but not before putting you to the question."
The force of the emotions that escaped the Naiad's rigid control had nearly pressed Felix into his seat. It was a terrible, maudlin caterwaul, a sadness that he had difficulty shaking from his thoughts. Whatever had happened to Zara was not something Felix had ever come close to experiencing.
"The System promotes strength," she continued, her voice firming with each word. "The strong accrue more power; power begets power, on and on, into infinity. The Heirocracy, like most nations on the Continent, rely on that superiority to rule. Buck those rules..."
"Yeah," Felix whispered. "You get crushed."
The weight of the moment threatened to drag the conversation down, but Felix couldn't allow that to happen. He had too many questions.
"Why does the System exist, though? It's natural?" he asked.