Book 4 Chapter 54.5: Uncertainty

++Lord Dread’s genius exceeds mine, I will admit that readily. But he had other disadvantages by the time we met. Ones that only festered as time went on.++

- Sethira, also known as Sakhent the Doom Lord.

There were many differences between myself and Sethira. Most considered us highly similar in nature, but I knew that neither she nor myself agreed with this.

Sethira, obviously, was rather more tactile than I was. Naturally okay with touching and being touched in ways that terribly bothered me. She took advantage of this to torment me at every opportunity. She had a different kind of focus, more scattered but indiscriminate, less pinpoint than my own. Our specialties in the realms of magic and science were worlds apart, and our design philosophy when creating something were as disparate as those of an artist and an engineer.

But if there was any one trait that truly set the two of us apart from one another, it was not any of those. No. It was her recklessness.

I was cautious, most of the time. Entirely fine with sitting back and biding my time, waiting long stretches for my plans to come to fruition. True, I had the occasional spasm of impulse, every now and then scenting a secret of magic far too useful and delicious to let lie, but as a general rule I was content to spend countless long hours working away at a problem with the confidence that time would eventually make me its master.

Sethira was not like that. She could be patient, when absolutely required, but over longer spans she preferred to be more active and take more risks. As Sethira saw it, the world was full of rewards that justified essentially any kind of danger.

I had to admit, she was not fully wrong about that. Some prizes were worth betting my existence on. That Sethira was so lax with what she counted in this category, however, was a source of continual friction between us.

And so it was not such a surprise when she made her suggestion to me, that we defy a God in order to hold onto the artifact that would restore her to the physical world for our own ends. And though I had a particularly strong knee-jerk reaction against it right away, a few moments of thought left me considering the option with a more measured attitude.

“Explain your reasoning,” I told Sethira. “Convince me.”

She was always good at that, and if she could not persuade me to cut my own throat as she could most people, Sethira always managed to highlight the advantages in a situation. She was very useful as a second-in-command for that very reason.

“In this case it’s somewhat self-explanatory,” she noted dryly. “You’re holding divine power almost in its purest form. I don’t think the magic there is as dense as in a Demigod, but we also have no clue what the fully assembled mask could do.”

“You wish us to try and repair it?” I asked.

“Obviously,” she grinned. “And if, in so doing, we end up possessing another, world-shaking source of divine magic, then that will be another leap forward for your experiments, right?”

She knew just where to strike. I had not exactly been sharing my dreams of walking the world with a Demigod’s body and seeing cannon rounds splinter against my skin, but it would not have been too hard to guess what I was working towards as I toyed around with divine magic. Sethira, too, would be eager for that very same power. It would be the greatest leap forward we had yet taken, sufficient to let the mere handful of ancient liches that made up my inner circle stave off all but the largest forces of Demigods by ourselves.

All hypothetical though, all, as of yet, uncertain. There is nothing more intoxicating than a goal yet unrealised, untouched by the ruinous taint of reality and left pristine in its abstraction.

“The rewards are potentially vast,” I conceded. “But so are the consequences of failure. Zameka is the only God that knows who and where we are, if we do anything to anger her we will be bringing a devastation down upon ourselves without delay.”

“We don’t know how she’ll behave if she’s resurrected anyway,” Sethira pointed out. “Gods aren’t like us, their oaths and words aren’t their bond. She may decide to smite us the moment she returns anyway, regardless of what we do. I’m suggesting that we ought to get ready to face that smiting with the power of Demigods added onto our current magic. I’d feel a lot better about rolling the die if we did.”

I weighed her words against the risks, rewards and my own natural eagerness for more power.

There were a lot of Demigods in the world, far more than there were liches. Perhaps as many as a thousand. If we were patient and cautious, there would be other chances to get other specimens.

But if we handed this mask over the moment it was repaired, without having secured one, we really would be leaving ourselves at the mercy of Zameka.

“How long did she leave you imprisoned in the Depths?” Sethira asked me.

“...Aeons,” I said. “More aeons than there are grains of sand in Est—”

“I didn’t ask for your life story,” Sethira cut in with a sigh. “Ugh, you’re always so dramatic about that, whining constantly.”

My eye twitched, and she continued speaking. “Anyway, the way I see it we both owe her a delay if nothing else.”

Now she was moving onto the final barrier; that we had both acknowledged a debt and given our words. Violating my promise outright, let alone leaving the scales unbalanced, was as unconscionable to me as hacking off one of my own arms, but here was Sethira providing a convenient out.

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It was tricky and twisty in a way that I did not entirely like. I have always preferred to keep things simple and direct when it comes to my own oaths, subjective interpretations and wordplay is a path that has led some liches down to eventually disregarding theirs entirely.

Still, this one was fairly direct.

Zameka had imprisoned me for aeons, I would retaliate with a delay. She had freed me from the rest of her kind’s seal, so I would repay it by bringing her back into existence. And if she emerged in her full power with a grudge against me, I would, if nothing else, ensure that I was in a strong enough position to make attacking me too costly for her while the other Gods remained at large.

Every aspect of my pride was satisfied by the suggestion, as well as that most vital feature of self-preservation. Ultimately it was the need to keep myself intact that superseded everything else, active threats to our own person does bring liches a bit of leeway in negotiations.

“Very well then,” I told Sethira at last. “We will hold onto it for a while, and see what we can do with it.”

As it happened, not a lot. I would probably not have made any progress at all with Farah working alongside me rather than Sethira, her own expertise was much closer and more keenly aimed at manipulating the finer, subtler magics that permeated the cosmos than any other of our kind.

Even still, this was divine magic, and thus beyond her true understanding. Unlike me, she could not even see the stuff in broad terms, and actually manipulating it was like trying to control the trajectory of a flying object by hitting it with thrown bricks.

“Don’t your eyes work with this?” Sethira snapped after several days of failure. “They’re meant to be able to do everything, right?”

She was irritated, and taking that irritation out on me. I decided to be the bigger person and keep most of mine hidden.

“No, you empty-headed dog demon,” I growled. “Divine magic is just…too different.”

That was putting it lightly.

Still, it was a difficult task, not an impossible one. Sethira actually took to it more easily than I did, making me realise just how much I had come to rely upon my own ability to physically perceive mana and how it behaved. Her practice with manipulating invisible forces manifested as great leaps and bounds of progress here.

After a fair amount of time, that was.

We talked as we worked. The whole task started to remind me of when we had first met, that hasty crunch to try and draw Zameka out of the Depths. Sethira had seemed confident, then, that she could pilfer the Goddess’ powers, but was not at all confident now.

“The ritual I prepared then relied on a God emerging through the gateway it created, I won’t be able to apply it here.”

“We could…” I trailed off. We could have worked to predict where Zameka would be emerging from and modified the ritual to simply trap another gateway, but that would be an obvious violation of our word to aid her. Sethira knew what I had been about to suggest and felt the frustration just as keenly as I did. We continued working in silence for a while.

Days passed. Sethira and I continued to gnaw away at our problem, making gradual but notable progress.

Divine magic is not quite like ordinary mana at all. It seems to behave more…organically. More volatile, yes, but infinitely more alive. In the case of this artifact, the spellwork woven around it seemed almost eager to reunite and mend itself.

It made things easier, to some extent. It also made them harder. Divine magic was more like an animal than a tool; it could take care of itself and maintain its own wellbeing in a way that no inanimate object could, but having it do precisely what you wanted was all the more tedious as a result.

Sethira and I became very frustrated very fast.

“How’s marital life treating you?” she asked me during one of our breaks.

I had still not had sex with my husband. He had insisted on trying several times, and each time had simply failed to do any of the things he was apparently meant to. But Ilgryn had seemed embarrassed about that, and I imagined Sethira would enjoy spreading it around for fun if I told her.

“Fine,” I said.

“A woman of few words, as usual,” she noted dryly.

We got back to work without much more time wasted on speech, for all Sethira’s mockery she was not especially concerned with conversation either. Not with the treasure-trove at our fingertips.

Another week passed, and we made our first breakthrough. I was able to coax the divine magic into reacting with a gentle nudge of my own arcane powers. Perhaps I had been doing this already, but this time it caused an effect that we could actually observe.

Sethira squeaked. I squeaked louder. Both of us laughed and jumped and hugged one another, then realised how undignified our display was and quickly parted.

“So,” Sethira cleared her throat. “That’s progress then. How did you do it?”

I thought for a moment, weighing my options, then showed her. She was able to mimic the technique quickly, and before long we were both focusing all the harder.

It was slow and tedious, and it did not ever complete the process on its own, but after more days and more techniques developed, we slowly managed to draw the mask fragments back together. Their spellwork repaired itself, while the actual substance followed almost automatically.

By the time Sethira and I had half-exhausted our mana, our work was done and we had a fully assembled artifact before us. A divine artifact.

Neither of us had the energy left to be anywhere near as animated in our celebrations this time, though Sethira still managed a long and drawn-out cackle before she settled back down. I just eyed the mask.

“This is a step forward,” my lover breathed. “You understand that right? This is the beginning of that new age you talked about. Liches with the powers of Demigods…Maybe with the powers of Gods.”

She was getting ahead of herself, but not by much.

We were able to induce a reaction in divine magic. At the moment, we could not control that reaction in any way that mattered. But that would change with time. Just as I had once learned to clumsily manipulate arcane mana as an infant, so too would I now gradually learn all the stimuli to which divine mana was inclined to respond. Sethira was right to call this a grand step forward.

I had a new opportunity resting in my lap. I had riches and power, I had independence, a growing supply of minions from Garamon’s most powerful family, growing strength in my own family, countless other things. A cabal of ancient liches temporarily sworn under me. Lord Dread may never have been more powerful in all of history.

So why did I not feel happy?