Taking the time to enhance the understanding of two of my spells was not a mistake. My thoughts were clearer, and I could see that, like the first vision of my home, this new vision had not faded.
That was the thing, despite my enhanced souls, my mundane dreams still fade because there was nothing to tie them to reality, after all, that is most of what makes them dreams, the way they come apart in your hands the moment you reach for them.
This vision had not come apart, and all of it sat in me whole and heavy, as if they were my memory... as if I was remembering it.
I closed my eyes and reached for the hollow place,
"The vision," I said. "Did you see it?"
"You were not in the loop, and the vision was not accessible to me. But I felt your distress. What did you see?"
I explained everything that I saw with the speed of a thought, realizing that I could send complete mental imagery towards the Avatar, and so instead of describing what I saw, I could just show it.
The Avatar was silent for a long moment before it said,
"That is not a dream, but mostly a memory."
I blinked, "Memory? Of whom?"
"Both of the times you have experienced this occurrence occurred in moments where your soul has been placed in particular distress. Perhaps it is the nature of the loop to return every bit of your soul to this moment, but your soul has been stained by the mental essence of those that have shattered it, and in bringing you back in one piece, I believe the loop gave you access to their memories, and for your soul to access those memories in a manner it could understand, your memories are mixed up with the memories of others."
I believed this was the longest the Avatar had spoken at a time, and everything it said was perfectly logical, and it reframed how I looked at the visions. My first vision had shown me the Caelith being torn open and the world destroyed; even the sun was eaten in front of my eyes... but what if those visions were not visions, but memories of the demons?
Maybe not just memories, but what the demons believe was going to happen to this world, and I was able to access it due to the nature of the loop.
The Jade Oracle had gone crazy in the end when I mentioned the loop, and she had killed me, destroyed me in such a manner that her consciousness or part of her soul touched my own, and when I returned, I may have glimpsed what happened ten thousand years ago.
If that was the truth, then everything that I had witnessed was not a nightmare or a vision of something coming; it meant that in the past, before the Caelith fell to this world, there had been two moons, and I realized at the end that those vast scaly wings and the beastly cries, those must have come from the Dragon God.
A thought entered my head, and I shivered. Was it possible that the reason that Mages were able to rise was due to the descent of the Caelith ten thousand years ago?
The devastation of the stars falling to earth must have killed or weakned the gods to the extent that all races, from humans, elfs and goblins were able to rise up against them, and if the Sovereign of the Stars had been able to gain access to some of the Caelith and absorbed some of the Celestial Energy within, it could have been what led to the birth of supreme mages across thre world, and cemented the end of the age of the gods.
I had not dreamed of the end of the world. I had remembered the last time it nearly ended, the night the stars came down, a moon shattered, a god roared, and the Caeliths fell burning into a world that had only just stopped belonging to the gods. I had watched it from inside a field of flowers, ten thousand years ago, with eyes that were not mine.
A soft chuckle came from me, and a sort of invisible weight left my heart. Before now, I was roaming in the dark, my entire existence reduced to kill and be killed, and the nature of this loop seemed too vast and unknown to me, so I did not know if my existence would make any difference in the long run.
I could see glimpses of this massive conspiracy, but I could not find my place in it. Now that the shadows of the past were being wiped away, I felt more certain of my path forward.
Secrets of the past were becoming known to me, and I was growing more assured of who I was becoming and what I needed to do.
As if acknowledging this was a final step I needed to take, a part of me that had been hidden opened up. My eyes widened as I realized that I had unconsciously placed a mental block on my memories... and only now did I realize what I had done.
The first morning. The very first, before the loops had a name and a coherent structure, before I had died even once and learned it would not take, when I was sixteen, ordinary in this exact same tent, there had been a blue light in my eyes. I had glanced at it and lost it under the avalanche of everything that came after.
I had the pieces now. I reached down through the many deaths that I had suffered and pulled it into the light, and it was still there, patient, written in the language of the System.
[ World Quest ]
[ Stop the Pale Matron from rising. ]
∞
As I read this quest that had remained at the top of my Status Screen every time I woke up, I understood why a part of me, at the beginning, had run away from this knowledge.
A quest, I had been given a goddamned quest by the system, which was the thing only favored heroes, powerful Sovereigns, kings, and emperors were supposed to have, and the damned system had handed me this on the first morning.