Vel had left Tomas about half an hour back.
Shaking him wasn't easy. They came out of the administration wing together, Tomas still talking about the special class. Then the rest of the Clouded, soon to be Chaos-attuned, caught up with them in the courtyard.
None of them had anywhere to be. There was no reason for one of them to go off alone.
So he told them he wanted to find Eliander and ask after his sister.
It wasn't a lie, just not everything.
The coliseum was almost empty from the outside.
A few groups of students stood along the walkway that led up to it. Nobody at the main entrance but two guards.
Maybe they tried already and got turned back.
This is a problem. Of course they'd post someone, a portal was opened in there after all.
He kept his pace and came up to the gate.
"Uhh... can I—"
"Archmagister's order." The one on the left didn't wait for the rest of it. "All students are kept out unless supervised."
"Until when?"
"Didn't ask."
"Until further notice," the other one finished.
Tsk.
Guess I'll have to sneak in somehow.
"Wait. You from the Clouded?"
The guard was looking at his patch.
"I think that's him," the other one said, low.
The first one dropped the official voice.
"She did mention a few exceptions."
"Name?"
"Velarian."
The two of them traded a look. Then they both stepped aside, and neither said anything else.
"Thank you," he said, and it came out like a question.
Vel followed the main path into the stands.
And inside, it was even emptier.
Every step he took registered somewhere in the stone and came back to him a moment later. Bare seats on every side of him.
Everything had been put back. The wall that came down, the scorched ground, the dark stains.
Like nothing ever happened.
He followed the aisle down, lower with every row, until the steps ran out at the barrier, stone at his chest, and past it the ground fell away to the field.
The sand was gone, cleared however they managed it, down to the bare stonework.
The spirals lay open across the whole floor, turning outward from the focal point at the center, exactly as they had the first time he stood over them.
Vel stepped back from the barrier and raised his hand out over the drop.
"Aeris Solith Temporus."
He set a hand on the rail and vaulted over it, out into the empty space beyond.
Then he dropped.
Three steps down, each one revealing a current of packed air under his feet, and on the last his weight got out ahead of him.
Whoops.
He got his feet under him and straightened up.
Not as elegant as the Archmagister, but it worked.
He walked the floor, watching the statues as he went. Seven of them set along the barrier above him, each one looking down into the field.
His feet were carrying him toward the place where—
No.
I'm not here for that.
He picked up a spiral in the stonework and followed that instead. The lines ran together as they went, two folding into one, that one meeting another, until he came to a point where several of them arrived at once.
And he stood there, looking around at the statues on the rim and the empty tiers above them, waiting on anything that hadn't been there a moment before.
Nothing came.
Why did it happen?
The first time I stood here. Then Severin. Then Celia.
Why did Zephyr channel through me. Or me through him.
He dropped down and crossed his legs.
If there's a pattern, it has to hold every time.
This one gives me nothing.
Either something sets it off, or it happens when it happens.
He opened the interface and went through it. Skills, talents, inventory. The affinity chart with every point on it still reading Null. He swiped them past one another and none of them had anything in it he hadn't already seen.
He closed it and looked up at the statues.
Then he stood.
"Zephyr." It came out low. "If you can hear me, answer."
Louder by the end than the start, and he caught himself at it, as though someone might hear him talking to himself down here.
Nothing.
Maybe it needs something it can actually recognize.
He closed his eyes and ran mana through himself, and tried to find whatever it was he had been feeling those three times.
Everything settled back the way it was.
He opened his eyes.
The place hadn't changed. He stood in the middle of it a while longer, and nothing came of that either.
Not as easy as I thought it would be.
He dropped back down onto the floor and crossed his arms.
After a while he leaned back on one hand and looked up.
Birds along the roofline, small dark shapes against a sky with nothing else in it.
Past the rim he could see the gods from behind. Six of them set along the outer wall, every one facing away.
Gods.
What did Tomas say this place was called again?
...
Divine Summit?
Divine.
He brought his status back up.
The title.
His finger hovered over the name a few seconds.
Not because it frightened him. He had changed it before and nothing had come of it.
No new power, no new talent, no skills, nothing that turned up anywhere on the sheet, and nothing in the world either. The only thing it had ever done was back then with Landre, when it gave him permission to use—
Wait. Maybe I got this the other way around.
Back in the game, a title gave you something. Stats, a bonus, a passive.
Out here that makes no sense.
Nobody gets handed Dragon Slayer and finds out he can kill a dragon. He gets it because he already did.
So the Divine title doesn't make me divine.
It's a credential, something that came along here with me somehow.
A key for doors a normal person doesn't get to open.
His finger touched the confirm, on nothing but empty air.
[Title Changed: Human → Divine]
He waited on something to follow it.
The arena stood where it was, quiet, the cold of the stonework working its way up through his trousers.
Hmm.
He closed the panel.
"Zephyr, if you can hear me—"
Everything around him went at once, like someone had hit delete on all of it.
What remained was sky. The same bright blue he had been staring up into a minute ago.
He was falling immediately after.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa—"
Arms out, legs going, nothing anywhere to take hold of. It went on longer than he would have admitted to.
"STOP!"
He dropped back onto the floor. Or onto what seemed to be one.
It was soft under him. Too soft to hold anything, yet it held his weight perfectly.
When he got up he could see the texture of it.
He was standing on cloud.
A mild breeze stirred across it, carrying the scent of distant storms.
Humid.
Then something moved ahead of him.
A humanoid shape materialized from the swirling mists, its form indistinct yet undeniably present. Cloud-like tendrils danced around the figure, never quite settling into solid definition.
Vel took several steps toward it, across cloud that seemed to stretch on forever.
The shape looked down at itself first, and only then noticed him.
"Zephyr?"
"...First One?"
"First One?" Vel repeated.
"Yes. First One. Progenitor. Creator. Architect. You have many names among us."
Vel had not expected Zephyr to recognize him.
"How is this possible?"
"Indeed."
Vel froze on that. He turned it over and nothing came clear.
"You're Zephyr," he said. "The Air Primordial."
"That I am."
"Wait. If you know who I was."
"Then you must know the truth of this world."
The figure paused, mist swirling more deliberately around its form.
Zephyr answered slowly.
"What we know is what you gave us, First One."
What I gave them...
"Pillars of the world."
I wrote that. At least that was the lore.
They were the power source. As long as they existed, the elements did.
They were supposed to know everything about this world. They were part of its foundation.
Vel looked up at him.
"Where are the other six?"
"Gone."
"Gone how?"
"The Awakening."
The cloud of him turned gray for a moment, and came back.
The Awakening?
Could he mean the expansion update? The one I'd been working on before everything went wrong.
"All seven of us felt it."
The form flickered.
"We felt the world's foundation trembling. Existence became unstable."
It paused.
"And the Void closing in."
"Do you know what caused it?" Vel asked.
"That. I do not know."
Zephyr gestured his misty hand toward Vel.
"But perhaps you do."
Vel's gaze went somewhere among the cloud beneath him.
Two chairs and a table formed themselves out of the cloud.
Zephyr gestured him toward one.
Vel's thoughts raced while he dropped himself into it.
"Could it be the Awakening update somehow caused the world to become unstable."
But as far as I remember, it was never fully deployed on the mainframe. Never connected to the core world.
The first instance it was ever connected was...
The S.I.P.
He turned toward Zephyr's shifting form, which waited patiently.
"There was an accident..."
The surge had gone through him hard enough to stop his heart. It killed him, and somehow it put him here.
What if it didn't only end my life?
What if it did something to this world as well?
But that doesn't explain how this world became so real.
"Am I still trapped inside the game?" Vel asked himself aloud, the words echoing in the cloud-space.
"Is there any chance I could return to reality?"
Zephyr's form rippled with what might have been uncertainty.
"That question lies beyond my understanding..."
"But are you suggesting this world is not just as tangible as the one you left behind?" Zephyr said. "What you define as reality is... subjective."
"As long as the two remain entangled, both are."
Vel processed Zephyr's words, then scratched his head despite no itch.
"There is no definite answer? How am I even here?"
His patience was thinning, and it carried in his voice.
"I mean, I created this world. From code. And now I'm here."
"None of this should be possible where I'm from."
"The only explanation left is that I'm dreaming."
"And even that shouldn't hold. Not for four years."
The mist form clasped its hands together on the cloud table.
"Have you ever asked...whether you created this world, or whether it wanted to be created by you?"
"Wh—"
It sounded like nonsense. But he stopped himself from saying so, because the more thought he put into it, the more of it stuck.
Zephyr lifted a hand over the table. A piece of cloud came up off it and split into two.
One drifted over to Vel. The other stayed with Zephyr.
"What is this?"
"My world and yours."
"Separated. But made from the same cloud."
"If I change mine, yours reacts."
"But yours has its own rules, so it does not react the way it should..."
Vel stayed silent and watched the cloud above his palm.
It was shifting, mirroring the one at Zephyr's side.
Two clouds. Two worlds.
One reacts to the other. But because each has its own rules...
Why does this sound like—
"Did you just... explain quantum entanglement?"
"I do not know of that word."
But he did, though.
Zephyr had just demonstrated something Vel had only ever understood as theory, from his old world. He had never known whether anyone proved it.
And if that's what's been happening all along...
"You're saying most of the ideas that ever came to me came through... this."
"Then which came first. The idea, or this place."
The mist gave nothing back.
"Does it mean I own nothing I ever created?"
"That cloud is still yours to hold, however you look at it. The world that you build layer by layer would not change its ownership."
Vel sat with that.
He either made this world or discovered it. Now he was sitting in it all the same.
He dropped his face into the table. It felt like a big pillow.
"Ugh... the more I learn about this world, the less I understand it."
"What did you say happened to the others?" His voice came out muffled.
"When existence balanced on a razor's edge," Zephyr said, "reality's fabric slowly unraveling, we employed the only power available to us."
"The seven elements that form our very core, the force that grants us immortality itself."
Vel's head snapped up, straight at Zephyr.
"You sacrificed your immortality?!"
The mist around Zephyr went still.
"There was no other choice."
"We seven Primordials wove a new reality from the old one using that power."
Vel kept looking at Zephyr but said nothing, waiting.
"We stopped the Void advancing. We kept the world stable. In return..."
"You lose what you were."
Zephyr nodded.
"We merely became concept. No shape. No form. Nowhere and everywhere. Until now..."
"So... you exist now because of me... Then the others are..."
"Neither existing nor erased."
So they could be somewhere in the world, waiting to be woken the way Zephyr was.
"But you said you stopped the Void. Why is it coming back now?"
"I am not certain," Zephyr said. "But everything follows cause and effect. Every anomaly demands explanation."
"This world struggles constantly to balance itself, creating reasons for the unreasonable. Something must always be sacrificed for something else to exist."
"Just like the dragons. Just like Flux."
"Flux?" Vel said. "The Chaos Primordial?"
"Another sacrifice. To invite unpredictability into this world, Flux gave up name and history"
That's why nobody remembers chaos was ever an element.
"Then what does that make me? My existence here."
"Perhaps only the passage of time will reveal the consequences of your presence here."
Vel straightened up at the word. Something came back to him.
"Speaking of consequences..."
He paused.
"Back then, you saved my friend. Celia. Is there a way to bring her back?"
"As I explained before, without your existence, I remain nothing more than potential energy."
"It was not me who saved your friend."
"The world we reconstructed follows principles much like yours. It operates by laws that even we no longer supersede."
Of course. When would it ever be easy.
"But should you require such power again, I will answer your call," Zephyr said. "However, channeling that connection demands a significant recovery period between us."
It's not impossible.
Like he said. To bring Celia back, I need an explanation.
And with a Primordial's power, maybe...
Vel leaned back into the chair, arms crossed, and looked at Zephyr without saying anything.
Across the table the form kept shifting. Humanoid enough, though he couldn't tell whether it was the shape of a man or a woman.
"Not as much of an 'air head' now, huh."
"I... have not heard that name in a long time."
"Was there anyone like me? Someone from the outside world."
"You are the only presence I could sense."
Another silence, and Vel ended it with a long exhale.
"Take me back."
The cloud dissolved. The sky stretched, and shifted.
The next second he was sitting on the arena floor again.
[Primordial Power Unlocked: AIR]
The notification flashed briefly across his vision before fading.
Vel stood up and dusted himself off.
He cast one final glance at the seven Primordial figures arranged around the arena's perimeter.
The thunderbird was looking back. Different from the others, in a way he could feel.
It watched him all the way to the exit, his footsteps echoing against the carved stone.