The revelations from the Hollow Avatar carried more weight than I could ever want, and it was a good thing that I was learning of something like this after I had died many times, or no one would convince me that what I was hearing was the truth.
It all sounded so outlandish to me, but I was in a fucking loop, and if I could keep returning from death while keeping every progress that I had made, then that meant something was very wrong, and I was dealing with powers beyond the comprehension of a mage.
There was no one I could talk to about this for them to believe me, until it was too late or I showed them irrefutable proof.
I slowed down my thoughts for a moment and shook off all the distracting sides of it and focused on what was important.
I had learned that the Caeliths were prisons that were not supposed to be here, and that their presence meant that the Order of the Heavens had broken, and that my loop might be a symptom of the same wound.
I sat in the cold space behind my soul and let all of it settle into me like silt into still water, and then I asked the Avatar the only question that had ever actually mattered.
"What can I do?"
I don’t know if this was a fair question, but whatever was happening here was so large that I felt useless in so many ways.
The Hollow Avatar considered it. I think I had begun to understand its pauses. This pause felt like an instrument running an honest calculation and not liking the output, so it kept crunching the numbers again and again and getting the same result, and finally, it answered me.
"About the Harvest? Nothing. This loop, the Conclave is beyond your reach. The Arcanists tearing through the seals that bind Silithra below operate at a tier you cannot contest for years of subjective time. The eruption is past the point of prevention. You could kill demons in this camp until the loop resets and not move the Harvest by a single minute."
"What about the members of this camp?"
"They are already dead. You know this. You have known it for several loops. I will not insult your intelligence by pretending the knowledge is new."
I had known. Hearing it said in that flat, careful, recorded voice did not make it easier, but it did make it clean. I held it in my heart before I rejected it. If I could not save this camp, then why was I fighting so hard against the demons?
At this moment, I was beginning to understand that perhaps seeking answers about my future from the Avatar may not entirely align with my interests, but I would be foolish to reject its wisdom.
"Then what?" I said. "If I cannot stop the harvest, and I cannot save them, what is the road. Tell me there is a road."
"There is a road. You are on it, and it is the only one."
∞
Its voice had a finality to it that made me feel like a man who was told that the shaking bridge made from flimsy wood will hold, who then looks down and sees how far the bridge has to cross across a lake filled with crocodiles.
There was a lot of random imagery in that thought, bite me, my mind was a mess.
After a short moment, I asked, "Explain."
"You are a mortal becoming not-mortal by a path my Architects did not anticipate and could not have built for. Silithra is a Class Six threat. To contest a thing graded above Transcendence, you must climb to the tier the title was built for. The Queens become killable there, but the Harvest is not a feature of the demons, but of the mages of this world; this is the road you can contest. Against a thing of Transcendence, you are a witness. Against the Harvest, you are a participant."
The road that the Hollow Avatar was presenting to me was simple. Its entire purpose was to kill demons, and somehow, this mission was tied up with my own.
Silithra was a Class Six threat, and what that meant for me was that I was unable to stop her, but I could stop the Harvest, which was the seals being released by the Arcanists, and to be able to do something like that, I needed to get stronger by killing demons and opening more gates.
Something was telling me that the Hollow Avatar was only concerned with killing demons, and my stopping the Harvest was a side effect of this.
"How many gates do I have to cross before you believe I could stop the Harvest?"
"More than you have opened."
If I could, I would have flinched, because the more gates I acquired, my grief sharpens, and I become something that strays from a man to a vision that was closer to that of the Hollow.
"So the road that is the only road is also the road that ends with me not being me."
"That," the Avatar said, "is the honest summary. I told you I would not be kind. I will, however, correct one error in your framing."
I waited for its words, and it did not take long for it to speak to me,
"You speak of the loop as a curse... and it is, but it is also the only reason the road exists at all. A single mortal life is not long enough to make this climb from a standing start, not by any path, not with any gift. The same breakdown that dropped these prisons onto your world may have placed you in a loop, and the loop, alone among all of it, is to your advantage. You have been given an impossible number of attempts at an impossible climb. No one in the Architects’ records ever had that. Not one. The thing that doomed your world also handed you the only instrument by which anyone from your world could ever do something about it."
I sat with those words, and with the flat tone of the Avatar, I could not fight against its words with emotions or gaslight myself with lies.
The grief did not get smaller, but something underneath it shifted, and I was beginning to understand that I had been handed a tool, told it was the only one, and told it would work if you were willing to pay what it cost.
The Harvest had begun, and at my present power, I would not be able to stop it, but as long as I kept killing demons and opening more gates, this task was no longer impossible.