First Among Equals-Chapter 18: Revisitation With Vai

First Among Equals-Chapter 18: Revisitation With Vai

Uncle Vai was dressed in an orange, wide-collared shirt with paisley designs on it. He was a stout man with a bowl cut, and the sides of his hair shaved. He had a magnificent mustache, the same black as his hair. His skin was as pale as Caen’s father’s. He sat in an unacceptably luxurious rocking chair made out of gold. It looked like a throne, except that it rocked back and forth, even when it hovered in the air, which it often did.
Through the two window walls on either side of the room, Caen could see the picturesque sprawl of the estate surrounding the mansion. The other walls, hewn from smooth limestone, bore abstract paintings and a giant taxidermy mount of a sea serpent so large it took up a third of the room. Ornaments of precious stone lined the surrounding furniture.
“Hey, Uncle Vai,” Caen said in greeting, as he stood up from his sofa.
“Feels like I haven't seen you in months,” Uncle Vai said.
“It’s just been a few days. How was your trip?”
“It was awful!” Vai said. “I had to walk for miles, and my feet are killing me.”
Caen laughed. Even if Vai did walk for miles—and Caen was sure he hadn’t—he wouldn't have felt any pain. It was possible to feel pain in the Astral Realm, but that didn't apply to Vai.
Uncle Vai was bound to the Astral Realm and couldn’t move or sense his physical body. In here, his senses of taste, smell, and touch were permanently sealed. He couldn't even so much as revisit his memories of those sensations. It was supposed to be some kind of punishment for something he’d done decades ago. Though he always avoided answering the question whenever Caen brought it up.
“And they made me do paperwork!” Uncle Vai continued. “Tons of it. What kind of sick mind insists on the use of paper in the Astral Realm! I’m telling you, these Lattice people are pure evil.”
Zeris walked into the room with a bowl of cherries. “If you’ve been working for an evil organization all this time, what does that make you?”
“I’m a force for good,” the man said shamelessly. “And besides, someone has to keep those bastards honest.”
“While being paid boatloads of criyl,” Caen said, smiling.
Uncle Vai shrugged. “Naturally.”
Zeris snorted.
Even though Vai made so much money from consulting for Lattice—the organisation behind the creation of Grat-line—Caen had always found it ironic that the man could spend none of it. A trust had been established decades ago to manage his funds and dole out monthly stipends for his upkeep. Vai complained about it often.
Caen began walking out of the room. “I’m going to use your library. I need to do some research there, but I'll be needing your help with something else.” Uncle Vai had one of the most comprehensive libraries that Caen had free access to.
“Ooh! What have you kids been working on?” Uncle Vai asked, rubbing his hands together. His throne hovered up into the air to follow Caen, but continued rocking. “Any dangerous projects that don’t require adult supervision?”
“Always,” Zeris said, tossing a cherry into her mouth and chewing loudly as she walked beside him.
Vai gave her a look of faux-loathing. “Why must you eat here, hmm? Don’t you have food in the real world?”
Caen laughed. “It’s not like you were going to eat it anyway.”
“Yes, but I’ve been trying,” Vai moaned. “And one day, I’ll manage it. I just need to persevere.”
Out in the Material Realm, Vai's physical needs were met by paid attendants who fed him and kept him clean. But in here, all he had were his senses of sight and hearing.
Uncle Vai could have transported them to the library immediately, but Caen preferred the scenic route. The hallway leading to the library was as wide as a street. Huge open doorways into other interesting rooms of the mansion lined the walls.
He saw some relatives of his relaxing in a steaming pool. Two children, eight-year-old twins from the commune, ran past him in stilts ten feet tall, laughing. An animated ribbon shaped like a gazelle bounded after them. Malo, an older relative of Caen's, zoomed past on a hovering platform, shouting, “Hi Caen, bye Caen!” He seemed uncharacteristically cheerful, which made Caen chuckle.
Uncle Vai’s library spanned five floors of his mansion, covered wall to wall in shelves crammed full of books, tomes, manuscripts, memory crystals, and more exotic modes of reading and entertainment. A disturbingly large portion of it was fiction, but a respectable minority comprised various other topics and fields of study. Floating platforms hovered inches off the ground. They could take Caen to whichever section of the library he desired to peruse.
The ceiling was made of glass, and beyond it, different species of sea life swam by. Giant orbs of light floated in the clear water, giving the windowless library the illusion of daylight sprinkled with the occasional drifting shadow.
This was the beauty of Astral domains. Uncle Vai had built this place over the course of his entire life; long decades of hard work and commitment. Or so he claimed.
A pane of glass had been erected into the ground. Uncle Vai only kept it around because some of their relatives used this library often. He had collated something he liked to call a Grand Index, constituting the indices at the back of every single resource here. And he kept this permanently projected onto the glass. The index display at Ser-gwu Island's general library wasn't even this intricately designed. Then again, this was the Astral Realm.
Caen looked through the Grand Index. The word ‘soul’ had just shy of a hundred thousand occurrences spread across thousands of books. He let out a heavy sigh. That was a lot to sort through, and even though reading in Uncle Vai’s Astral domain took much less time than in the Material Realm, Caen had already been asleep for the better part of two hours, and he fully intended to wake up early. Uncle Vai had laughed in his face when Caen had asked about time dilation last year.
Zeris patted Caen’s shoulder sympathetically. “I’ll leave you to it. It’s been a long day. I’m going to take a bubble bath, then I'll meet up with my sister in Grat.”
“Tell her I said hi,” Caen said.
Uncle Vai frowned at Caen. “I sincerely hope you don’t intend to have me sort through those books for you. I would rather stare at a freshly painted portrait of Tahal's face as it dried.”
“I'd never ask that of you, Uncle Vai,” Caen said as he stepped onto one of the floating platforms and rose up into the air. He could at least look through some of the books before he left. “I want to revisit a memory of mine from two nights ago.”
“Why?”
“I found my third bloodline.”
“What? Really? I go away for one day. One day!”
“And a fourth bloodline, too.”
Uncle Vai sputtered.
“Oh, there’s more.”
“You can’t possibly be serious.”
* * *
Caen sat on the floating platform, leafing through a manuscript he’d pulled out from one of the top shelves. Uncle Vai hovered beside him, hand to his jaw, as he processed everything Caen had shared with him. They were about a hundred feet off the ground.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; any instances of this story on Amazon.
Uncle Vai insisted that the protections in the library were far more sturdy than the ones in that other place, but being so close to the glass ceiling made Caen shudder. Horrifying beings that wore the forms of sea-life floated overhead, along with softly glowing orbs of light.
Caen closed the manuscript he'd been reading and returned it to its place on the shelf. There was nothing of note in there. And annoyingly enough, the word ‘soul’ was being used interchangeably with spirit.
“Possessing four bloodlines seems utterly bizarre to me,” Vai mused. “This one cousin of mine, Oirick—utterly insufferable fellow—was born with three very convenient bloodlines, did I tell you?”
“Yes, Uncle Vai. Several times.” Oirick was something of a celebrity in the Ereshta'al family. He'd participated in the Patronage trials decades ago and had set the record for the highest points earned by any single person in the history of the competition.
“Oirick is a lap dog of the family,” Vai said, frowning to himself. “And I'm not just insulting him. Having three bloodlines is rare enough that I don't know of anyone else with something like that. As soon as the family realized how useful he was, they wrapped him so tightly in oaths that he couldn't so much as leave the island without explicit permission.”
Caen shivered at that. This was exactly what he’d been afraid of. He vaguely remembered how much of an interest he'd been to the family elders as a child. Would Elder Gev, for all his kindness, have subjected Caen to the same fate as Oirick? He grabbed another book from the shelf. “That’s another thing I wanted to talk to you about, Uncle Vai. I might end up participating in the Patronage trials this year.”
Vai's frown deepened. “Hmm. That's going to be quite the challenge. You already have a reputation, but there’s nothing wrong with being a little special. Being
too
special, however? Now that's where the danger lies. You’ll have to hide this four bloodlines business. Off the top of my head, I can think of a great many lunatics who might see you as a fascinating curiosity for them to piece apart. I'm not just talking about our family. Participating in the trials wouldn’t necessarily earn you the wrong kind of attention, but you’ll need a convincing explanation. Eh. We'll think of something. Anyway! This other thing you're calling Soul-sense, I'd like to see it in use.”
“Can't activate it right now. I was still on the cusp of will fatigue by the time I went to bed.”
“Will fatigue, shwill fatigue! Come on, kid, don't be a wimp. All that stuff is made up. Just power through. Trust me!”
Dream-guardians typically had more refined wills than the average spellcaster. And among Dream-guardians who were at the Attuner stage of magic, Uncle Vai was in a class of his own in terms of talent and skill. Caen gave him a sidelong look.
“Bah, suit yourself,” Vai said, trailing beside Caen as they dropped back to the ground. “So, how do you want to do this?”
“Internal observation, please,” Caen said, already focusing on that specific moment.
Vai snapped his fingers—even though he absolutely did not need to—and the world around them twisted in on itself before morphing back into shape.
Caen was back in Redshadow.
There was that hollow discordance he always felt during an instance of revisitation. His current thoughts clashed with those from back then. Caen sank into the sensations of the memory. He'd practiced this sort of thing many times with his mother and Uncle Vai. He felt the urgency from that day overshadow his thoughts. He felt that pressing need.
“Hello, Zeris!” Uncle Vai greeted, standing beside Caen, though obviously these memory constructs could neither see nor interact with him. “Hello, wereperson! Hello, strangers I've never met before. Huh. Where's Vensha?”
“We didn't come with her,” Caen said.
“She won't like that,” he chuckled darkly.
Out the corner of his eye, Caen noticed movement on a distant outcropping high up above them.
Seven
tails of writhing shadow.
“Seven,” said Affen.
Shadelings didn't have eyes, but somehow, he felt like the humongous creature was watching them. Watching him.
Uncle Vai whistled. “Seven tails. What a beauty.”
“Second tensest moment of my life, I'm telling you,” Binam said, chuckling.
“What was the first?”
“Oh no, no, no, please, wait,” Uncle Vai said. “I need to hear the rest of this.”
Caen tuned them out.
Uncle Vai tsked. “Awww.”
Caen delved into his spirit. If it had buzzed with Fermien, now it sang. The intensity of that tugging, that pull, was far greater.
Locating his bloodlines had always felt like carefully trying to chart a course to him. Now, he was a leaf pulled along by the strong currents of a raging stream.
He could feel his excitement from then writhing within the cool grip of his mental discipline.
The bloodline visualisation technique held. A rhombus.
Before his mind's eye, it solidified and shifted angles. This had never happened before.
A transparent speck began forming within the rhombus.
The visualisation technique shuddered but did not collapse.
The speck expanded into a transparent sphere that quickly grew to encompass the rhombus.
Caen gasped, his eyes snapping open.
He'd been blind for so long, but for the first time in his life, he saw.
Several things happened at once, and Caen failed to keep track of it all.
“Hold, please,” Caen said.
“Holding,” Vai replied.
Caen examined his spirit. He couldn't use Spirit-healing in the Astral Realm, let alone inside an instance of revisitation. But he could tap into his spiritual faculties within the memory. Only a small portion of his mind back then had been focused on his spirit, so he strained to make sense of what he’d been sensing then. After combing through it several times, he found nothing amiss. When he was satisfied, Vai resumed the sequence.
A number of things were happening at the same time, but Caen narrowed his focus to his soul structure in the memory.
His body, too, was overlaid with a similar tapestry of threads and sensations and sounds. A flurry of impressions flooded his perception. His entire being hummed, numerous parts converging into one absolute note.
A portion of Caen's existence stirred. It curled, remolding itself, moving as though in conformity to some unclear instinct. Something fundamental changed him.
The razor-thin, black line between him and Zeris felt firmer.
“Hold, please.”
One thing stood out to him. Fundamental change. His soul structure was different now. Even the absolute note of his soul structure had changed. That change had been instantaneous and had happened just as a portion of his existence remolded itself. He felt certain that this was responsible for the affinity boost that came after. But more importantly, his existence had moved in conformity to something else, and the fact that his connection to Zeris had felt more solid afterwards implied to him that her soul structure was somehow involved.
He had Uncle Vai reiterate that section of the memory over and over again, and each time he paid attention to something new.
In time, he was able to point out what specific portion of his soul structure had changed. A cluster of tangled threads. It escaped his notice easily when he was focused on the whole, but when he observed it closely—its tangles, knots, and loops—he could tell that it was somehow more… prominent, more active than the surrounding threads of light, smoke, and color.
Tracing the more visual aspects proved difficult as the threads wound tightly around each other, blending into the surrounding threads. The sounds, sensations, and impressions of this specific cluster were even harder to pin down, especially because every other portion of his soul structure was producing sensory effects of its own.
He memorized the layout, the colors, the configurations, and spent some iterations going over the sounds till he could vocally reproduce an analogue of them. Uncle Vai resumed the sequence.
Caen focused this time on Zeris's soul structure, hoping to find what exactly in it had influenced his, but a series of iterations yielded nothing.
“Hold, please,” Caen said with a little disappointment. “It's almost exactly how I remember it.” He'd been hoping that revisiting the memory might trigger something more useful that he'd missed.
“Alas,” Uncle Vai said dryly, “the curse of a good recollection.”
“I want to go over a few more things. Just to make sure I haven't missed anything.”
He had Uncle Vai reiterate some portions of the sequence for what felt like an hour, pushing the man's forbearance to the limit.
Afterwards, Caen let the rest of the memory play out, allowing Vai to observe Soul-sense in action. He quietly watched as Caen disrupted the spirits of his party members and shadelings. As well as the first instance of boosting his proficiency in Spirit-healing.
* * *
“I don't know what to tell you, kid,” Uncle Vai said, “but I have no clue what that thing is.”
He and Caen were out on the rooftop terrace of the mansion. Caen was lying in a hammock with a small lute on his chest. Its design was far more complex than any Caen had ever seen, and its range utterly outstripped the one Caen had in his room. Uncle Vai claimed that this was a replication of an instrument he'd once seen in East Vedulan.
Caen strummed out notes identical to that fundamentally changed thread cluster. At the same time, he hummed the vocal analog he'd constructed in the vision.
Uncle Vai was sitting on his throne, rocking back and forth. He frowned as though he were being put upon. “I’m intrigued enough that I might just have to look through those books myself. Ancestors’ balls.”

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Chapter 18: Revisitation With Vai