Chapter 140: Chapter 140

Within her soul space, Elise was still a vaguely humanoid blob with rabbit ears. She knew she should have been working on that, but with no deadline, she wasn’t in a massive rush. Of course, she wanted to get it figured out as soon as possible, but she also wanted a mental break from work. Months and months of constant stress and grinding was taking a toll on her mental health.

That said, when she got into her soul and noticed her form, she grimaced. She didn’t like not knowing who or what she was. This was part of the reason she hadn’t started working yet. Because she knew that as soon as she looked at it again, she would feel the urge to get working immediately, and would lose all that nice relaxation time she had been having lately.

Fortunately, at the moment, she had a goal, and after one final annoyed look at her stumpy, featureless arms, she focused her attention on the edges of her soul. She had no idea what she was looking for, but hoped she’d recognize it when she found it. After half an hour of meditation though, she came to the conclusion that she was going about this from the wrong angle. From within her soul, she couldn’t really sense anything outside her soul. She couldn’t even sense her body. She needed to take a step back.

She exited her soul, but maintained her meditative state, trying to stop halfway. She didn’t enter her soul again, but she tried to get to the point where she could clearly sense it while also sensing her surroundings. Next, she tried to focus on the sensation that came when she used {Fey Bargaining}, both the chilling sensation, and the aether ropes she had noticed when she made the deals with Irylax. She was fairly certain that the ropes she sensed then were simply a more tangible, obvious form of normal aetheric connections.

It was much simpler in concept though than in practice. She meditated for what felt like an eternity, and by the end, she felt no closer to sensing anything than she had been when she started. It didn’t help that she was completely full on aether, so her senses were somewhat obscured by the dense cloud of it hovering around her. She would have loved to expend it somehow, but she had experienced firsthand how much effort that took when working with Irylax, so it wasn’t feasible. Besides, she couldn’t keep relying on that trick. If she had to spend all her aether just to sense the connections every time, that would severely limit her ability. She needed a way to work around it.

After a bit more meditation, she decided to go with a different approach. She needed a starting point. A connection she could latch onto and follow. {Fey Bargaining} made the most obvious ropes, but all her aether-based skills worked on similar connections that she could sense. They weren’t the same as the passive connections that existed, but they were similar. And with {Aether Sense}, she could now sense the others clearly enough that she could use those Skills through walls.

She was sorting through her Status Window for a harmless Skill when she suddenly came to a chilling realization. She was not the only one in the house who could sense Aether. Subtly using aetheric Skills through walls on the others would probably not be taken kindly. She sensed Irylax still moving around above her, so she took a deep breath and used {Whisper} to the dragon, as she felt that was the greatest danger.

“What is it, rabbit?” replied Irylax immediately, sounding mildly annoyed.

“I’m trying something out, but I need to use some of my aether Skills, so I just wanted to let you know so you didn’t think I was doing anything weird.”

“What are you trying?”

“I’m trying to sense passive aetheric connections, so I thought I’d use some active ones to give me a starting point.”

“I see. Are you doing it right now?”

“{Whisper} is an aether Skill. You should be using it right now to help.”

“Don’t do it with me though. Bother my apprentice. Tell her to train her own senses with it or something. I’m busy.”

Elise had barely begun to sense the connection formed by the Skill when suddenly it was severed.

Well, that’s progress, at least, she thought.

She sensed Sophie sit up straight in her bed. Sophie didn’t have {Whisper}, so she couldn’t respond.

“I’m training a Skill,” Elise explained. “Irylax told me to get your help. You can use it to help work on your {Aether Sense} or something. Basically though, I just need to keep this {Whisper} connection open for a bit, so I’ll be talking in your ear. Sorry.”

Sophie nodded, then sat up straighter and started doing something with the aether around her head. Elise guessed it was her {Dragon Eyes} Skill. That was fine.

“I’m just gonna count upward. Sorry if it’s annoying, but it’s something I can do without thinking about it. One. Two. Three…”

As Elise slowly counted upward as she aimed her main focus at the aetheric thread that had formed between her and Sophie. It pulsed almost like a heartbeat with each number she counted up, getting thicker while she spoke before thinning back out during the silence between. With this rhythmic pulsing, she entered a trance-like state where she did nothing but focus on the connection. She was not aware of how much time was passing. Only that it was. Soon, she drifted off to sleep.

When Elise opened her eyes, she found herself in Sophie’s room. Except she wasn’t actually in Sophie’s room. Not really. Her point of view was from the upper corner, and she simply hovered there, looking down onto the bed. Sophie looked directly back at her, her eyes glowing yellow, her mouth slightly ajar.

“Snowberry?” she asked.

When Elise tried to respond, she was suddenly thrust through the walls back to her own body, and she opened her eyes, still in the same lotus position she had been meditating in before. A moment later, she heard a noise from the hallway, and then Sophie burst into the room, her eyes still yellow.

“What was that?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Elise. “...But it was pretty cool.”

“How did you do it? It was like you were there, but you weren’t. I could see you, but you weren’t there. How did you do it?”

“Well…” said Elise. “I honestly don’t know. I was meditating, and then suddenly I was there.”

“Cool! Can you teach me how to do it?”

Elise was about to say yes when she began having second thoughts. She didn’t think Sophie was the type… but giving a teenage girl the ability to spy on other people in her dreams seemed somewhat unwise. She falt bad about her mistrust, but at the same time, she felt that even if Sophie could learn it, it wasn’t the kind of power Elise should teach her without permission.

“Maybe later,” she said. “Once I figure out how to do it myself. Which I need to keep doing right now.”

“Right,” said Sophie. “I’ll go back then. Do you still need to talk to me like that?”

Sophie left and Elise returned to her meditation. While fully aware that she had no idea how she had just done that, she also felt a bit giddy with success. What she was trying was possible, and that proved it. She just needed to be able to target it without having an open aether connection.

Over the course of the next hour or two, she managed to return to that disembodied state three more times, each time more easily than the last. On the third time, when she returned, something had changed. It was subtle, but she had an odd awareness of Sophie that was separate from any of the rest of her senses. She couldn’t tell where Sophie was, or what she was doing, but she knew that Sophie was somewhere. It was like she was sensing her mere existence.

She immediately went right back to meditating, but unlike previous attempts, she did not use {Whisper}. Instead, she focused on this new feeling and tried to internalize it. After a few minutes of nothing, she tried a different angle. The sense of Sophie’s existence didn’t depend on her meditative state. It was there whether she was sitting or standing. Whether her eyes were closed or open. And she was trying to figure out how to control her dreams, so why was she trying to do this while awake. She knew that in the previous attempts, the disembodied state had triggered as her mind drifted off into sleep, but that seated position wasn’t the best for sleep.

She lay back on the pillow, closing her eyes and getting comfortable. The whole time, she kept the connection between her and Sophie at the forefront of her mind, and a minute later, she was back in Sophie’s room.

She couldn’t speak, but she could still see. It looked like Sophie had fallen asleep. Elise felt a bit guilty for keeping Sophie up as she realized what time it was, but it looked like it had sorted itself out on its own. Sophie would still be a bit tired at school in the morning, but what teen wasn’t?

Elise watched over Sophie for a few seconds longer before she started experimenting with what she could do in this state. She didn’t seem to have a body. As far as she could tell, she was just a disembodied pair of eyes, but she would be surprised if from the outside, it didn’t look like that. With no body, it took a few seconds to figure out how to move herself around, but she managed without much difficulty. Unfortunately, she couldn’t move beyond the bounds of the room, and she couldn’t turn herself to face any direction that took Sophie out of her line of sight. She wouldn’t be able to just float around like a ghost and spy on whoever she pleased, but that was fine. She didn’t need to. She only needed to lock onto one monster and find out where it was.

Finding the connection to the warg would still be a problem, but she now knew vaguely what it was supposed to feel like. Sophie’s presence was a bit of a distracting sensation, but as she lay in bed, she managed to somewhat tune it out as she searched for similar connections. It was late, and she was tired, and she might have drifted off once or twice while she worked, but emboldened by her success, she kept trying until the early hours of the morning.

When light began to peek in through the curtains of her room, Elise knew she should have been getting to bed soon, but she couldn’t stop. She felt like she was close. By referencing the connection with Sophie, she was able to get a general sense of how the connections worked in general. They were aether, but they didn’t work like the raw energy that her body produced. They were almost invisible unless being actively used, making them incredibly difficult to locate. However, after hours of meditation, and likely helped by her sleep-deprived, semi-delirious mind, she felt like she could almost sense them. She couldn’t make out any individual ones, but she could feel that there were thousands and thousands of threads tied to her. She just needed to pick one out.

Just as the others in the house were starting to wake up, she finally found one. An individual thread that stood out from the rest. It wasn’t Sophie's, but it was even stronger somehow. Elise wasn’t sure who the thread connected to, but with no better leads, she mentally tried to grab it as she finally let her tired mind rest. When she fell asleep, she had a brief moment of delight that her efforts had paid off, followed by an extreme sense of existential dread as she realized that she had come somewhere she shouldn’t have.

“So, you’ve decided to visit me this time, hmm?”

Elise felt like her brain was melting. To her eyes, or whatever this spiritual equivalent was, everything looked somewhat normal. She was in some kind of open air pavilion surrounded by a garden filled with countless flowers and fruits in different colors. In front of her, Titania lay on a low couch, casually eating a blue, grape-like fruit. She was in what was probably her natural form, looking almost human, but not quite. She had the same golden hair, but her ears were long and elf-like, her eyes were like spheres of pure molten gold, featureless but ever-shifting, and from her head, a crown of branch-like horns sprouted, each of their many offshoots bearing a different flower. It was surreal, and beautiful, but it was not the sight that made Elise feel like her mind was about to break.

There was a strange intensity about her location. Like the very air itself was trying to drill into her head and lobotomize her. The pressure got more intense with every passing second, and in her incorporeal form, there was nothing Elise could do to react.

“This is too much for you right now,” said Titania, popping another blue grape into her mouth. “Perhaps next evolution. For now, you wanted to view the warg, yes? I will send you to him for now. I recommend not returning to this place though. Not before you’re ready. In the meantime, I’ll be having a chat with your other guest." Latest content publıshed on n0velfire.net

Other guest? Thought Elise vaguely.

At that moment, a shadow fell over the garden. Titania ate another grape, then waved her hand. Elise felt her consciousness fading, but just as she was about to vanish, the shadow descended, and she caught a glimpse of an enormous scaled head approaching Titania.

Then, the pressure was gone, and Elise was staring into a cave. She tensed as she recognized the massive white form of the warg, then relaxed as she noticed it was sleeping. And it wasn’t alone. Next to it, snuggled against its side, a dozen of what she recognized as centipups slept with it. Some of them looked a bit older than Skitter the centipup, the Grays’ pet, meaning they were evolutions, but their base forms were unmistakable.

Elise watched, waiting for something to happen, and time seemed to accelerate, the shadows shifting rapidly, but while the canines tossed and turned a bit, none of them woke up before Elise was back in her own body in her bed, wide awake and well-rested.

Well, at least I know where he is now.

From what she had heard, Carsas was an enormous continent, but now that she knew the warg was there, she at least had a starting point. She couldn’t head there yet, but she could prepare. And if she found out how to control her dreams better, she could continue to watch, perhaps finding landmarks and locating the warg more precisely. It was only a matter of time. And time was something she had in spades for the next two weeks before classes started.

The pavilion and garden were gone. All that remained was a smoking crater, at the bottom of which, Irylax lay, pinned to the ground by an invisible force. Above her, Titania floated, still laying on her couch, her platter of blue grapes floating in front of her.

“Not bad,” she said. “But you’re still a few centuries too early to challenge a god.”

“Am I?” said Irylax, her voice a deep rumble.

Titania’s words turned into a cough as she doubled over, putting her hand to her mouth. She lowered her hand, now splattered with blood as her coughing fit turned into a laugh.

“Well done!” she said. “Very well done! I didn’t even notice!”

She waved her hand, and all at once, the destruction began reversing. Irylax was released from her restraints, lifting herself off the ground before turning to her human form. Below, the garden reformed. The dirt and stone returned from where it had flown, evening out the ground, and reconstructing the pavilion as the plants regrew. Irylax and Titania descended into the still-reforming pavilion and another couch for Irylax appeared as they settled down.

“It’s been a while,” said Irylax.

“I’m glad to see you’re doing well,” said Titania. “I was worried for a bit when you were stuck on the island. I think you would have found a way out on your own eventually though.”

“Probably,” said Irylax. “Oberon sends his regards.”

“He wouldn’t need to if he would just do his damn Divinity Quest,” said Titania, still smiling. “How long is he going to keep me waiting?”

“Until you descend and drag him up with you,” said Irylax with a chuckle. “As always.”

“Won’t that be the day… Well, I know you don’t have much time, so I’ll get straight to the point: how did you do that?”

“You saw me on the island, right?”

“But did you see what I did?”

“Since I am confused, I will assume that I did not.”

“In order to stave off the insanity, I retreated so far into my own soul that I forgot the way out. While my mind was broken, my soul was intact, and growing stronger. I expect that I perhaps have the deepest understanding of the soul in the mortal realms.”

“Fascinating,” said Titania. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“Some things are better left unsaid,” said Irylax. “But regardless, what I did to you was about a quarter what I could have done. Do you think I’m ready?”

“Not even close,” said Titania. “Even if you caught him off guard like you caught me… Well, I am one of the youngest and weakest gods. If you went all out, you might be able to defeat me, but even then, I would survive that initial attack and be able to fight back for a bit. Against someone like him? You’d be lucky to slow him down for more than a second.”

“Maybe a second is all I need.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you’ll fail and die a very painful death.”

The two sat in silence for a few seconds until Irylax’s form briefly flickered.

“You can’t stay much longer, so I’ll leave you with some final words: don’t try it. You’re a thousand years and at least a tier away from being ready. Even if by some miracle, you managed to win, you wouldn’t be able to handle the consequences as you are. Be patient.”

“I know,” said Titania with a smile. “But neither is he, and while you’ve made good progress, you seem to be underestimating him, thinking he hasn’t improved either. Anyway, tell Oberon to stop being such a stubborn ass, or else I’ll tell Elise what his true form is. And feel free to come visit again, though I’d prefer if you didn’t destroy my garden next time.”

Irylax never finished her sentence, reappearing back in her bedroom. She gave a deep sigh, then reached for the book that had fallen onto her bed when she vanished. She flipped back to the page she had been on when Elise so rudely took her from the middle of it, set part of her mind to reading, then retreated back into her soul. The duel with Titania had been a good test, but it wasn’t enough. She needed to be stronger if she wanted to defeat her father. She needed to refine the techniques she had experimented with while trapped on the island, she needed to refine her strategy to work on a real opponent, and most importantly, she needed experience points.

Fortunately, she knew just the person to give it to her. She had been meaning to pay Rayna a visit for a while now. Even a vampire as ancient and powerful as her couldn’t get away with messing with a dragon’s family. Once Irylax found her…