Chapter 279: The Weight of Knowing
The passage climbed. At first, I had not noticed it, but I soon realized that we were moving upwards after a while; that was how subtle the elevation was. Also, I had been focused on the Inscriptions on the walls, and even though I did not check, I felt that my Inscription level had reached the peak of the Adept Tier, and every moment I spent looking at the inscriptions on the passage walls was slowly grinding down the barrier separating me from the Arcanist level in Inscription.
I knew how valuable it would be for me to reach the Arcanist Tier in Inscriptions, enough to call me a Master Engraver, and I wondered how many Master Engravers there were in Aldenmere Academy.
The Sovereign in front of me had not made any sound for all the while that we were walking, and I was content to follow him and watch the walls, and his voice shook me from my state of enlightenment.
"Do you know where you are?" he said, but he did not turn around. "The significance of this place, and everything that it holds, do you know what it is?"
I took a moment to reply, as I recalled the creatures I had seen, imprisoned in vats and siphoned of the Law fragments they held. I strangled the shudder of revulsion and anger that nearly emerged from me, but maybe Sid noticed it, because the corner of his mouth arched a bit. "A prison," I said, then I corrected myself, "A facility for plundering."
Sid glanced at me, and I could see that he was surprised. "Very good, you have great deductive reasoning, but still, you are held back by your vision."
He stepped forward into the dark ahead, and I followed, and the dark opened.
∞
I had a feeling of vertigo when the world in front of me suddenly expanded without any warning.
One moment we were walking inside a passage, and the next, the scene before me had spread out into a massive chasm.
It took a moment for me to understand that this passage had taken us to the peak of this facility, and I was finally able to view everything all at once, and the sight was nearly mind-breaking.
It was a good thing that my time in Caelith Mourne and seeing massive beings like the Jade Oracle, especially the Pale Matron, had given me the foundation to withstand beings and structures of massive scale.
Explaining this thing is hard because you really need to be standing in it to be able to understand.
We had come to the highest gallery of the interior, an apex where the vaulted dark drew up to its peak, and from here the whole facility opened up to me, and it went on farther than sight in every direction.
I saw thousands of glowing vats of different sizes, laid out in rows and rings and spirals, and every one of these glowing vats likely held a life. The fox made a small sound against my neck. Even she had nothing to say about it.
But she was right when she had said we had not explored much of this facility; what I had seen before was barely one small corner of a massive field.
"You are focused on the wrong thing," the Sovereign gestured, and I followed his hand, and I saw spectral links connecting all of the vats like threads of a spider.
When he saw that I had seen the links, he nodded, "Now look at the center of the web."
I looked over and saw that the entire facility was built in a way that everything was bending inward, and only following the links could you see the overarching design of this place... everything had been built around this core, and the entire facility seemed more like offshoots.
And at the center of this facility was a statue.
It was enormous, and yet, if the Sovereign had not directed my sight from the link to the statue, I would never have been able to find it.
What was remarkable was that it was not as if this statue was hidden, but the arrangement of this place followed such a vast and mysterious rule that only those whose souls could pierce through this mystery would be able to see it.
This statue rose from the floor of the facility far below and climbed nearly to the height of the gallery where I stood, and it dwarfed everything. It was of a figure carved from the same not-metal-not-stone as the Celestial passages, standing, robed, and hooded.
The face of the statue was lost in the shadow of the hood, hands folded, and then my eyes widened as I tracked that the link above every vat ran into the statue.
Suddenly, one of the links lit up, glowing a pale yellow, and something was drawn from the vat below the glowing link, and this glow flowed across the link into the enormous dark statue and vanished as if it did not exist.
"That," Sid said quietly, "is where they go. Every fragment of Law harvested in this place."
I swallowed, my throat suddenly feeling dry. "Who is he?"
The Sovereign glanced at me, "I think you know who he is." Then he gave a weary chuckle. "I have stood before his statue for eight thousand years, and yet, I still cannot find the mysteries behind it. All I can tell you is that from the moment of its creation, the world changed... and there are three more places like this in the world."
I had seen hooded figures in this place before, small ones. I had walked past them, and I did not know their significance, thinking they were most likely decorations or tools of surveillance, but they were all small copies of... this.
"The statues in the halls," I said. "The hooded ones. They’re..."
"Lesser images of the one at the center. Yes." Sid did not sound surprised that I had made the connection. "The whole facility is built around him, and every hall points inward." He looked out over the enormous dark. "This place feeds the statue, and for all these years, I have been watching over it."
"You wanted the scale," the Sovereign said. "There it is. The true shape of the thing you told me you would break, and it is not the anchor, it is not me. It is not even this place." He gestured at the hooded figure and the entire facility with a sweep of his hand. "The one who owns it all... that is who you are fighting."
He turned to me, and the wariness was back in his eyes, and under it, the thing I had no name for.
"So before you tell me you can win," the Sovereign said, "there is one thing you must understand about him. And I think you are finally standing in a place large enough to hear it."
I looked away from the hooded giant, and I looked at the ruler of Darkness, and I asked the question I had been carrying since that shadow inside the Pyramid first named me a world’s last argument.
"Then tell me," I said. "The Sovereign of the Stars. What sort of a person is he?"