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year 5, quarter 3
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He laughed, that prematurely greying boy. Short as it was, it was the relaxed, comfortable laughter of somebody who covered his mouth with one hand while holding a stem glass in the other as they engaged in saucy exchanges with others at a trendy restaurant. Mikkel lived, for a lack of a better word, by the idea that if you drew a simile, it was just good work ethics to quarter it too.
Mikkel had also existed for long enough to tell the difference between confidence and mere bravado, with a few centuries to spare to realise to grow accustomed to the idea that even confidence itself did not always come with the wherewithal to justify it. When the boy drew closer and began circling him the same way a lion would circle a lone gazelle, all Mikkel did was to follow him with his gaze with both bottle and brush still in his hands.
“Ah, where have I heard this spiel before,” he said flatly as the boy stopped right in front of him. He removed the cork from the bottle with one careful movement, he dipped his brush, turned to the unconscious coeurl, and painted two perfect circles on her fur. He then began adding runes, patiently, one by one. “Look, the last time I served anyone, I was still alive and in regular employment.”
One more line there to close the shape… Yes, there it was. Mikkel placed his distal phalanxes on each of the runes he had drawn, whispered a short spell, and watched sparks erupt from his person and sink under the beast’s skin. The magic circle lit up faintly for a few moments, only to disappear from existence altogether when it stopped.
“All done. Anyway, is what you have just described something you normally call an ‘Akashic’ by any chance, or is it a same phenomenon, different terminology or even world kind of deal for you?”
Ah, a new one. Fresh off the Rift, as some might put it. One could not possibly be ignorant of one of the biggest cities on the whole continent otherwise, even without having to know its customs. At the same time, nobody in their right mind would ever mention personal acquaintance with the Bahamut so casually in a conversation with a – no, scratch “a”, it was really several strangers. Not that, Mikkel determined, there must have ever been much going on in there in the social graces department. A rare flash from the distant and ever-dimming star of his own social self-awareness made him nearly recoil at the thought that such a critique was coming from him.
Still, it was a specific name – a toponym, as a matter of fact – that drew most of his attention: Valisthea. For somewhere that was certainly not in his own world nor on Zephon, it rang a bell. Valisthea. Mikkel plunged in the lake of recollection and searched for memories of past reads and past conversations, and while a mind unbeholden to mortal limits was not prone to memory lapses, a life of sixteen hundred years contained a significant number of memories and experiences. Yet, the mechanism stayed the same, therefore for it to ring a bell like that must have meant that it was a relatively recent memory… Ah!
“So they do,” Mikkel agreed with the kind of tone very elderly men with their hands perpetually behind their back used when commenting the inevitability of bad weather. He, for one, had never seen a dragon – dragons, not drakes – charge into battle alongside those who, as far as he could tell, were humans, least of all Bahamut. Only the most powerful of summoners could even hope to perform such a feat, but then he already knew that was not the case there. If there was a Dominant of Odin, and he’d met him already, there was no reason to think there could not be a Dominant of Bahamut. And it was not that kid.
“Terence,” he repeated, if only to fill in the silence as he searched his mental vocabulary for a name that was not his own. He looked for a name fitting for Provo, the city of profit, a city where no self-respecting inhabitant would ever be caught staying still, a city of riches and of widening class divides. A city that breathed invoices…
He extended a hand that no amount of padding in his gloves could have made anything more substantial than thin. “Brambilla,” he ventured uncertainly. “Brambilla Fumagalli, and yes, yes I mind, I appreciate you asking.”
Had Mikkel still had eyebrows, they would have raised in near-clinical contemplation. He stood in silence, waiting for answers that never came, and then allowed for the pause to grow lengthier still, until it bent under the weight of the fruit of discomfort that ripened sprouted from it and ripened not unlike a tumour. Mikkel waited for the young man to pick it up and savour it before finally weeding that pause out.
“Close,” he commented wryly. Sometimes, one had to concede that, for most people, a big bad rabid magical cat was not nearly as remarkable a sight as a walking and talking osteological exhibition. It was, Mikkel believed, a matter of predictability. With a big bad rabid magical cat, you knew where you stood, and even if that usually meant almost right before the gates of kingdom come, people treasured the little certainties in life. He, however, was a sentient, malicious, and rather creative fellow. A crossroads smack in the centre of nightmare town, as it were.
He conceded that right up until the man opened his mouth again. He was a sassy one. Faced with the prospect of being torn apart and then some by a wild beast, then rescued by pure accident only to look at death in the eye sockets once more and even more vividly than before, he would dismiss questions addressed to him and respond with a voice that was dripping with conceit.
“You know, I can’t help but feel I’ve just been racially profiled.” He searched into one of his other satchels until he produced a small bottle of ink and a thin calligraphy brush. He gave the bottle a vigorous shake. “And that makes cock-up number fourth for you in a little over one minute. You failed to get killed, you failed to answer my questions, you failed to identify me, and you failed to show me some respect. How’s dad, incidentally, since we’re already on the topic?”
Mikkel knew the type all too well. Of all the people one could meet out in the wilderness at night, he had just found himself a power bottom.
Find the continent’s most fertile land, realise it’s smack in the middle of two major settlements, and on it slap a community founded on an idea of industriousness extreme to the point of performativity that owed most of its wealth to trading. If one were to give this mix a few generations to stew, they would be given front rows to an ever-degenerating show where notions of success came to be equated to notions of intrinsically good moral character, and therefore lack of success with intrinsically bad moral character. Add transactional elements to community life, and those who would need support the most would have ended up being unable to afford help and participation in community.
One day, the pockets of disenfranchisement within the city of Provo would grow to full ripeness, and Mikkel promised himself that he would be there for the harvest, or even just the gathering, as there was no need for him to lift so much as a finger if all he wanted was a piece of fruit to bite into. Still, it was a truth most ancient that intervention begot efficiency. It was in fact older than farming itself, if only due to the domestication of animals preceding even that as far as his world was concerned.
You had to choose your soil wisely, and your seeds and the time of the sowing even more so. Once in a while, weed out all that would get in the way of the final goal, and seize the moment when the time of the harvest comes. Garden and fields both would see the process to completion in months-long cycles. An empire, a kingdom, or even a city – past a certain size, there was no real difference – would take years, or perhaps even decades. Still, Mikkel could wait, for the building up to the Moment was nearly as enjoyable to him as the Moment itself: the moment where he would strike a match alight and toss it into the powder keg…
…Which wasn’t an agricultural metaphor at all, but the main point remained: fuck Provo, eventually.
It was not yet the Moment. It was rather a time of maintenance, a time of checking one’s garden for pests and weeds and diseased plants to prune and to root out. He was walking the streets of a densely populated area in the outskirts of Provo, inhabited mostly by seasonal migrants and labourers. They were rowdy streets, if not truly quite chaotic yet, for it was market day and one had to slalom through the crowd.
He chose that day on purpose: while the cloak he was wearing concealed most of his features, and a mask on his skull made him appear to be a bespectacled, moustached elderly man with a very prominent nose, it was in large numbers that one would find real invisibility. Of course, it was also in large numbers that one was most likely to find something interesting to observe.
Such as a man calling out for Bahamut, the Dragon King. A fairly large group of people had collected around his stall, so he could not quite see his face from there, but then a roar tore the very air and made it so that where one had to look was up, at the sky, well above the crowd and certainly well above the man.
It would have been inaccurate to say that, to Mikkel’s surprise, there really was a dragon up there. In fact, Mikkel was not surprised at all: you didn’t call out to people like that if you didn’t have a show to give, and the dragon was there alright. However, what he did not quite get was why. Why, exactly, anybody would think that the best way to use such power – or to convince others that he was using such a power – was to display it as the main piece of some sort of freakshow.
Perhaps, Mikkel thought, it was a form of religious fervour, though the tone didn’t seem to suggest it. A more plausible explanation was that the poor bastard was attempting to convince people that they, too, could end up possessing Bahamut’s power if only they were willing to part ways with just enough bucks.
He observed silently, but most importantly, he listened. He listened not to the roars or the fluttering of wings, but to the heckler who had just appeared on the scene. It took Mikkel all of three seconds to dismiss the thought that he too must have been part of the gig. Three seconds was all it took for the stall owner’s face to twist from surprise to indignation and barely suppressed anger as the dragon landed again. It was hardly bigger than a cat.
Having seen enough, Mikkel snapped his fingers, and a blinding light flashed on the crowd, followed by a loud crash. When the people opened their eyes again, they saw a stall split in half and no dragon to speak of. Mikkel calculated that it would take them a few seconds to fully process what had just happened, stall owner included, and with the small dragon now flailing helplessly under his right arm, he followed the heckler away from the centre of the action, half-walking and half-jogging until he caught up with him.
“Say, kid, how come do you sound like you’re so familiar with Bahamut you might as well have had him over for tea, yet appear to have never been in a place with more than a dozen civilians in it at a time including family dinners?” He said. “You say the stuff you’ve just said in a place like Torensten, and you get your portrait in the next day’s bulletin next to a comment about the dumbest lynching victim of the decade, which while I would find hilarious, I suspect it would be robbing the world – and me – of some far more worthwhile entertainment, soldier.”
Somewhere on the Fractured Plains, Mikkel was en route to find one of the most convenient sources of magical energy one could find in the area: a coeurl. Coeurls were not creatures of subtlety, being more than twice as large as the average adult, still-living human being, and both hunted and defended themselves through the use of bright, hard to camouflage raw magic, the kind that shone more brilliant than even the moon and the river of stars overhead.
Mikkel patted his pouch and heard the reassuring glassy clink of the half a dozen cenocites he had prepared for that night. A cenocite was nothing more than a piece of exhausted magicite that underwent a purification process and was then enchanted with the ability to absorb magic energy from the environment again. Enough of them of the right size and potency could power an airship. He would know, as they used to power his own airship.
With that cloudless sky and the air so still, it would have actually been a good night to fly one. Soon would come the time where he could design and build something new for himself. He only needed a large and safe enough place and the materials for its constructions, both of which would have taken, in turn, time.
Ah, but time, time he had plenty of.
He stopped, his mind brought again to the present moment, when he heard a rustle in the tall grass, which was followed by another, and then more still, in ever quicker succession without ever quite becoming a continuous sound – that would have been the wind, and there was none to feel that night, which itself meant that the balance of probability was that the noise was caused by a living being.
So, Mikkel turned his head in its direction, and found the coeurl. With the creature not having seen it yet, and with there being no wind to bring his smell to its nostrils, Mikkel was in a rather favourable position. At the same time, one wrong movement could have alerted it of his presence, and the hunt could have ended up failing altogether. Moreover, with a coeurl weighing ten times his own weight, taking one on did not come without risks…
…and this was the kind of moment that would have called for slow, dramatic drumming and low-pitch chordophones to accompany the commentary of some well-educated, mellow, yet intrigued octogenarian, if not for the fact that the second the coeurl tried anything funny with him, Mikkel would have fried his sorry arse all the way to Torensten and then back.
Still, that would have been no less of a failure. Mikkel stayed back and watched. If the coeurl was on the prowl, then his best shot was with finding a spot with a good visual and no obstructions in the way, all while staying hidden in the tall grass for as long as possible. He took a few careful steps. He found it. He reached into his pouch for a small, round crystal, no bigger than a fist.
A surge. Mikkel drew his arm behind him, took aim, and then flung the cenocite at the coeurl. Silently, it darted in the air until it reached the source of the surge. It then stopped in mid-air, drawing the electric magical energy into itself and absorbing it as the coeurl snarled in surprise, and then in pain as it realised it could not stop. Voracious, the cenocite kept on draining at the coeurl’s magic for ten, twenty, thirty seconds that turned into a full minute before there was nothing else for it to take. As the night stilled once more, the coeurl thudded sideways on the grass.
Mikkel calmly walked up to the creature and recovered his stone, which was now glowing an eerie purple and giving faint crackles. He then placed a gloved hand on its chest, which rose and fell faintly, with the heart still beating inside it, which meant that it was still alive, that with any luck it was going to survive, and that soon enough it would be ready to be harvested anew.
He looked further down its length and found that the coeurl was a female, which made the situation even better, for not only could he draw energy out of her again, but he could also track her down to take perhaps a couple of whatever cubs she might have in the future. Surely there must have been some use for those long, rather sinewy whiskers.
“Ah, saved you by accident, didn’t I?” He said then to the tall human man that he had just noticed. Young platinum blondie or just plain platinum, no beard, must have been maybe seventeen. “Perhaps I interrupted a test of courage, or maybe a suicide? I can help with the latter if I find the reason you didn’t go for the good ol’ noose and let the ghost loose interesting enough.”
Mikkel gave a noncommittal shrug in response. He said it already: it really depended on whom you were sacrificing to, and what you were asking in return. His interest nonetheless lay with those entities who would require a life to be taken, and therefore establishing how much one could strip from a life while making sure it would still be recognisable as a viable sacrifice. Or, in simpler terms still, how much human, dwarf, goblin, or werewolf needed there to be? If you were on the run, you could not really bring along all of your prisoners so that you could continue working on your projects. You had to pack light.
“It’s the empty space between worlds, to make it as easy as I can. It’s what makes sure that they do not touch.” A membrane, as it were. Or the cheese between each hole, except the exact opposite of that. On second thought he was glad he hadn’t used that metaphor. “Still, I will need some more time to elaborate on them; see if they can become more than conjectures.”
Yes, once a researcher, always a researcher. It wasn’t even a sentence that needed further affirmation, not after saying that once one becomes undead, one gets to choose at last what truly matters to oneself. And now Barnabas understood it too – even if in his case it might have been more accurate to rebuke that once a warrior, always a warrior. Whatever his story had been before Zephon, Mikkel wished he had seen it unfold, for a fool’s errand or a twisted goal were no less entertaining than a clear path and more illuminated ambitions. After all, all stories worth their salt required but a wish.
“If it’s a warrior you are looking for, I found a mighty one in a pirate captain I met at the Pale Coast near the city of Torensten, all the way west from here. Also, there’s a colosseum over there, run by Tonberries. I should think there’s plenty of what you’re looking for there and yes, I do mean it. You’ve gotta start somewhere, eh?” He raised a skeletal arm to the west. “Shortest way is through the Kahiko Valley, if you don’t mind a hike or two. Or you could take the long way south, then west and up north again. You still have a mountain range in the way though. Anyway, should you look for me again in the future to talk about the progresses we will have made, I dwell at the Pale Coast myself. Farewell, then!”
“Right, I don’t.” Certainly not akashics, at any rate. Some form of energy remained a necessity; what changed with undeath was the nature of that energy, as well as that of the method of its procurement. A lich only needed a tiny amount of magical energy to function, and a lich could only become a lich because they trained themselves into having lots of it and using it very efficiently. It was as if an animal learnt to sustain itself by doing nothing more than breathing. “Hey, just a funny little trend I noticed,” he added, quietly acknowledging Barnabas’s past as king. Mikkel gave the possibility of a former viziership a moment of consideration as well, only to admit that he did not feel a whole lot of slime from the kid. There was rather a touch of martial hubris, and you could not get kinglier than that. “Anyway, research. Lots of things, actually – you would not believe my bibliography – but since you sound like you want to know about the experimentation on living beings, think about the investigation of what even constitutes human sacrifice. Variances in rituals, their optimisation, amount of human to be sacrificed, what is the bare minimum that may still be recognised as human by the beneficiary of the sacrifice. And so on and so forth.”
He allowed some time for the information to sink in, and for a curious person’s imagination to do its job. It was a shame that he could not read people’s minds to see what images they could conjure without visual aids. He waved his hand again. “Lots of content, not a whole lot of relevance, and I could not bring my work with me to this world anyway.”
Instead, Barnabas raised an interesting point: some… some elements of his world carried over to Zephon. Ifrit, Shiva, Ramuh – all of them were as much of a part of this world as they were of his native one. Apparently, they were part of different ones as well.
“Clearly this did not apply to the… spirits? Let’s call them that. To the spirits we seem to both know. My money is on what we call the Rift between worlds. I think it’s got to do with this fun little phenomenon.” Mikkel shrugged. “A bit odd that they seem to share the same names and general physiognomy across worlds, eh? Yet you notice the small differences, like Shiva’s cup size. I already have a hypothesis or two that I might explore about that, actually. Well, three, if you count padding.”
Hypothesis one, the spirits, if one could call them that, travelled across the Rift and between worlds much more freely than anything else in existence could. You could summon most of them into battle, for the void’s sake! Hypothesis two, they were all different emanations of one original version of the spirit that existed somewhere in the Rift itself or in one of the many worlds.
Still, Mikkel’s knowledge on the topic had always been remarkably lacunose. It wasn’t as if, try as he might, he could never pierce the secrets of the Rift. On the contrary, Mikkel did dedicate a handful of years to investigating it, which was why he knew anything about it at all. He then realised he had found out enough to know better than try to pry any further. Scratch the dangers of merging entire worlds with one another – that would have been positively thrilling – poke enough holes in the all-too-gossamer fabric of space-time, and you were bound to end up in one of them yourself eventually, and good luck getting back to any kind of world after that. It was second only to the Void itself in his list of topics not to touch with a six-foot pole.
But now, well, now he was well past that point, was he not?
“You’re welcome. You gave me an idea on what I want to study next, beside this world itself. And I believe this answers your question about why I’m here. With that said, may your future tribulations be a source of my entertainment.”
Although brief, that bout of aborted chortling did not go unnoticed. It meant to Mikkel that the man was starting to learn, though that kind of wisdom probably had to erode its way through several strata’s worth of sedimented religious indoctrination and the queer circumstances of his revenancy. Whatever was awaiting on the other side was bound to be interesting enough to be worth a revisit, but you had to let the decades do their work first.
“Curious that, most people object to the baker bit instead.” As he said that, he raised a gloved hand to his head and turned it a few times. It was a little remembered fact that skeletons did not in fact have palms the same way people who still had flesh about their person did. Once you got past the carpals, it was just fingers all the way to the tips. Kneading dough became therefore rather more challenging without some external support. “Anyway, I’m a bit old school, you could say. When you’re old school, you always get some poor buggers knocking on your door – or knocking it down, really – to try to vanquish you in the name of goodness, justice, their kingdom – and it’s always a kingdom, never an empire or a republic – or any divinity you can think of. Or even bandits, once in a while. In the meantime, there are times when you’re in need of test subjects or human sacrifices. So, when they just deliver themselves to you without you even asking, do you send them back? No way.”
Of course, there were other circumstances under which he would find himself with guests unexpected and otherwise. A bunch of notables from neighbouring lands that he’d kidnapped at some point from one reason or another, the odd prospective understudy, countless runaway youths… And it would take all day to go over them, though there were a couple of anecdotes worth a retelling, like the time when a random princess somehow managed to sneak into his lair and tested no less than seven different beds in about as many different cells and firmly believed there were seven versions of himself called Michael, Mickey, Miguel, Michele with a k, Mikhail, Mitchell, and Cornelius Algernon “Grievous Bodily” Harmsworth. That one had been trouble.
“Odin,” he repeated. “Alright, I know that one – big guy, always on horseback, very martial.” Until his death, the guy had said. Mikkel decided to hold on that thought and promised himself to address it later, because that was getting ridiculous. But Mister Flatbread had decided in the meantime to get to a bit of good old brown-nosing, and Mikkel would sooner be found dead(er) than with his pants up for that – you had to respect some nice villainous flattery. It was just good manners.
“Indeed. For over a thousand years I have struck fear into the hearts of the common people. Some, I made rare. My name is featured on hundreds of ballads and many a chronicle, on dozens of epics and countless pieces of actually quite deranged literature that thumbs its metaphorical nose at basic notions of anatomy of any species.” And now that he was on Zephon, even he could not fathom the latest inevitable developments. “He who allowed the non-flying to fly, a prodigy of technology and magic alike, now an enemy to all! He who in hindsight is not very good at anagrams yet dares you to find the differences between these two paragraphs! And– Yeah, and so on and so forth. Charmed, I’m sure.”
“Indeed. For over a thousand years I have struck fear into the hearts of the common people. Some, I made rare. My name is featured on hundreds of ballads and many a chronicle, on dozens of epics and countless pieces of actually quite degenerate literature that thumbs its metaphorical nose at basic notions of anatomy of any species.” And now that he was on Zephon, even he could not fathom the latest inevitable developments. “He who allowed the non-flying to soar, a prodigy of technology and magic both, now an adversary to all! He who in hindsight is not very good at anagrams yet dares you to find the differences between these two paragraphs! And– Yeah, and so on and so forth. Charmed, I’m sure.”
Finally, Mr. Flatbread – or rather Barnabas recounted the tale of his reclaiming of his free will. It was rather short and perhaps more anticlimactic than expected. Yet, at the same time, it felt fitting. He who embodied Mr. Big Warrior Guy with Sword and Spear and Horse, taking back his freedom for the sake of a bit of fisticuffs. A warrior through and through, truly. Well, Mikkel considered in the traditional way that led one to conclude a thought with “I guess”, as long as emancipation was in the picture.
“Yes and no,” he said in response. “Or to better explain: when you die, your body and mind no longer force you to… care. Care for things that would have mattered to you as a human, or a dwarf. Survival, mostly, and what it takes you to achieve it as an individual or species.” Society, for example. Family, reputation, duty, companionship. “Yet, it does not prevent you from caring either. You are simply free to choose what you want to focus on, everything else be damned. It’s quite liberating, though I’ll admit it takes a while to really get to this stage. Didn’t realise it myself in the first few years, I have to say. Anyway–”
–and now came the knot to the handkerchief that he’d made earlier.
“You said you are going to be the Dominant of Odin until your death. But then you became undead. Then Ultima’s chosen vessel killed you. And now you’re here, alive or undead. Look, I am probably putting way more thought into this than I need to, but: what?”
Mikkel shrugged. “You give too much weight to the distinction between the mundane and the esoteric. Very meaningless words, the both of them, and the distinction is a burden that can only exist in your head. I’m dead–” He paused, rethought his wording, continued, “Undead serious: only after death did I learn how to make a proper akashic. And I couldn’t even eat it. Tested it on my prisoners, I did.”
Some evils, like Necromancy, occasionally turned out to be really propaedeutic to other, even greater evils, like Decaseification, or Decaseination, or Cheeselessness, which in turn prepared one to even higher impieties, such as the wanton capitalisation of torturous coinages.
Akashic-in-his-sense-of-the-word or not, to cling onto such a duality at all signalled to Mikkel that, when all was said and done, there was still humanity aplenty within that kid. Humanity that he might just have been unwilling to shed. He wondered how long it would take for the kid to realise that.
“Alright, putting aside for a moment the fact that you and I clearly have very different ideas of what ‘dominant’ means, I feel I got the gist of it.” Humans developed free will afterwards but Ultima could not or would not remove it and Mikkel still stood by the idea that that Ultima was an incompetent cretin, aether was magic or some sort of magical energy and no mistake, and dominance was in all probability something Mikkel would have called ‘affinity’ instead. “So, let’s get to the bottom–” Two well-timed hems. “–what are you dominating, at the end of the day? Actually, hold on that thought. Let that be an asterisk for later.”
After all, that was the kind of blank he could fill with the help of some very cheap novels he could buy, steal, or otherwise obtain at a great number of newsagents’ shops and-slash-or public libraries across all of the continent, but especially at a certain kiosk in Regina Highwind Alley in Torensten no earlier than half past ten postmeridian, except on Tuesdays.
“You took your will back! Interesting! You now get to hear my real name: it’s Mikkel, but you can make an anagram of it and get my epithet, which is ‘The Rust Baron’, if you think it sounds fancier. So, what made you decide to take back your free will, undead junior? It doesn’t take a nose to smell the one big heap of bovine manure in your story here. Or was it all one big and unnecessary figure of speech?”
“Well, that is interesting, because you see: akashic, in my world, refers to a type of oven-baked flatbread that is served with no cheese toppings, which is the most sinful state for a flatbread to exist in.” It was either that or a type of thorny shrub, anyway. “I always say: you can skip the tomato sauce and still make it work, but never the cheese. It’s just wrong.”
He waved a dismissive hand. Maybe it was a thorny tree. Honey was involved somewhere too, he was pretty sure.
“Hold on though, I need to get this straight: your Ultima needed some servitude, and decided that the best way to go about it would be by creating humans. Except, humans have free will. And that’s bad. So, Ultima tells them that it’s a sin, and if they’re undead, they’re less sinful. He began stroking his beard thoughtfully. “Look, I’ll even fill in the blanks here and assume that they need to be the right kind of undead, that is to say those that are made undead by somebody else and are thus controllable. Is this like, real, or is it just mythology? Please tell me it’s just mythology.”
In hindsight, that was a very stupid question, albeit not due to some ontological lack of sense so much as the choice of person to whom he had just addressed it. Of course, he expected to hear, it was real, and even if the man had neither born witness to his world’s own cosmogony nor heard the tale from Ultima himself, there was very little a strong enough faith feared.
“If free will is intrinsic to humans, Ultima should have known about that from the very start, and could have thus chosen to create anything else to serve him – if man can manage that with simple machinery, I don’t see why a god couldn’t. If free will was instead added onto humans, then it stands to reason that it could have just as well been removed from them from the very start, instead of simply requesting that they do not exercise it. I mean, that is in itself a bit of a paradox, isn’t it: even complying with such a request would require agency.” It had to be mythology. You could not even argue ineffability there: it was his interlocutor himself who said that free will was not part of Ultima’s original plan, and even then, nobody would ever convince Mikkel that ineffability wasn’t anything more than a rhetorical smokescreen for the failures of those alleged higher beings who couldn’t tell their heads from their arses if you gave them a map. “If Ultima failed where man succeeded with a fraction of the effort, then Ultima is hardly worthy of man. In other words, you’ve been worshipping a complete tit your entire life: congratulations.”
He stopped talking to allow the man to soak in his words and allow him to react… what was the word? Maybe organically? Organically felt fitting enough. Still, there was one more question that Mikkel had to ask.
“Ah, so you’re an undead as well. An acacia– an akashic. So, did you actually cast away your free will, or are you just telling yourself that to convince yourself you’re a good… Ultimian? Ultimanian? Ultimaniac? Lastie? Not familiar with your terminology here.”