The moment I grabbed the bottle, another of the same kind appeared in a small flurry of glittering light, the cabinet restocking itself from whatever stocks it had available. Quite the nifty trick.
Next to the cabinet was a small desk holding trays, glasses, and whatever else might be required to properly prepare any of the drinks found here. Grabbing a glass and a bottle opener, I made my way outside and onto the balcony. According to my time piece it should be early evening, although the view outside was as unchanged as ever, a constant twilight that didn’t budge no matter what.
Sitting myself down onto the sofa, and enjoying the pleasant breeze for a long moment, I opened the bottle of wine and filled my glass. The scent itself was already rather curious. A mixture of sweet and bitter, with a note of more esoteric tastes hidden beneath; equal parts fresh and earthy. I couldn’t think of a single comparison, so I simply nodded to myself and took a small sip.
Truth be told, I had no idea what my expectations for the taste had been. But whatever it was, it wasn’t this. And I had absolutely no idea how to describe it. It was definitely pleasant, the sort of thing that I could drink constantly without ever getting tired of the taste, but also not so overwhelming as to drown out everything else.
Nodding to myself again, I settled in for a moment of quiet. Technically I had scheduled to do some more training later, but it wouldn’t hurt to take a break, and I did feel like enjoying the sight for a little while. The view wasn’t anything to write home about, thanks to the perpetual twilight and the state the city was in, but it somehow still felt… I wasn’t sure if important was the right word or not. It felt vaguely fitting, though.
With another sip from the wine, I leaned back. The sofa was still surprisingly comfortable despite its state. Enough for me to lose myself in my thoughts.
For once I didn’t think of anything in particular, simply riding the wave of my mind, letting it steer me along the myriad of things that had caught my attention ever since I had woken up. There were so many things that I wanted to learn about. This was a world based on what I had created in my own imagination over the course of years. I had spent countless hours going over a number of things. It was only natural that I wanted to see it for myself.
Over the last couple of days I had played with the idea of ignoring the sense of warning I felt when I approached the city limits. To just go out there and do some exploring. To see Fendalyr, and the rest of Satien, to meet the people. But I had refrained from doing so, simply because it was such an instinctual reaction–instincts I had inherited from Vuthe–and I trusted those instincts.
Vuthe was… In a way she was the person I always wanted to be. There was a reason a lot of her life was based on my own past. With some changes, of course. She had the one superpower I respected the most. Which wasn’t some kind of supernatural ability to cast magic, or to shapeshift, or whatever else. It was her indomitable will. Her ability to set her mind to something and then go through with it no matter who or what tried to stop her.
Even though I could remember little to nothing of my own personal life, I knew that I had the bad habit of starting a myriad of projects, only to drop them all not even half way in. I had trouble committing to something, even in my own mind. In games I was never able to settle for a class, at most a playstyle. And even then I tended to switch things up.
If I played some RPG and the classes were locked per character, then I had multiple characters all around equally geared, and each with a different class. If the classes weren’t locked, then I would switch routinely, learning each class sufficiently to be decent, but never truly standing out with any single one. The same went for my favourite series of all time. Other people had a single weapon they mained, or one they played far more than any other weapon, no matter which entry they were currently playing.
I didn’t. I had weapons I focused more on for each game, sure, but at the end of the day my Guild Card, or Hunter Profile, or whatever it might be called each game, showed clearly that I used just about every single weapon roughly equally.
And it was that same way with everything I did. I had a severe issue with committing to anything. I had started so many stories, so many ideas, all of them quite detailed, and I spent large amounts of time and effort on each of them, but most didn’t even get out of the planning stages. I had entire drives full of documents, each a new start, and each abandoned.
Vuthe was meant to never be like that. To never waver. She put a goal in her mind, and she went through with it. Hells, in lore she told Death to fuck off twice. The first time it was a sort of mutual understanding that she wasn’t supposed to die.
The second she just literally didn’t have the time to die. She had people to protect.
And now I was her. Now I was inhabiting her body, slowly learning all she knew over time. It had been nearly two weeks since I had arrived here, and yet I still wasn’t sure if I should be happy or anxious about it all. Vuthe was in some ways an idealised version of me, but an imagined one. She could be what I wasn’t by simple virtue that I was the author, and that I could write her the way I wanted her to be.
Would I be able to live up to that? Would people notice if I couldn’t?
I had absolutely no illusions that her friends would realise. They had gone through a war together, had spent millennia in each other’s company. They had experienced so much, had learned so much about each other, and had become a tight unit. Almost family.
Really, in many ways they were closer than a family.
I would stand out like a sore thumb. And then the question was, how would they react? Would they try to kill me? Think me an imposter?
Well, depending on the question about my soul, they’d know the moment they sensed me anyhow. No way in hell would they be able to miss if my aura felt different from Vuthe. Not these four.
The thought made me glance down at my body, the memory of all those scars hidden underneath my clothes coming to the forefront once again. I grimaced as I emptied the glass and refilled it.
These scars were a testament to how much Vuthe had gone through. How much I had put her through. It wasn’t some physical wound that she could heal from. No, those scars were inflicted on her soul, the most intimate part of any being. Something unique that would serve as an identifier for the rest of her existence, even through the afterlife and her return to the cycle of life. A permanent mark.
I stopped, blinking. Then I replayed that last mental comment once again.
Putting down the glass and the bottle, I quickly dismissed my scales, revealing my naked, scarred body. I blinked again.
I had these scars. Scars that were meant to be scars of the soul. Of Vuthe’s soul. Souls were unique. They couldn’t be copied. They couldn’t be cloned.
I blinked yet again, staring down at my form.
These scars were extensive. Very few would be able to survive long enough to suffer through them. Pretty much the only reason Vuthe could was her indomitable will. A will that transcended the limitations of life and death. She had told Altis to fuck off twice, and it was exactly that ability to refuse realities cruel games that had given her the ability to survive something that should’ve killed her many times over, at the cost of her soul.
And now I bore those scars. Those signs of a struggle of survival that went far beyond the physical.
That… almost certainly had to mean that I had Vuthe’s soul. That, in some way, I was Vuthe. But that didn’t make any sense… How? How would that work?
Had Abyss just implanted memories into me to make me think that I was someone who I wasn’t? It would take a truly mind boggling amount of mental magick to make me forget everything I’ve ever known, and to implant memories and deep rooted recollections to fake another identity.
Yes, many of my memories were missing, but I also had those moments where I knew something fundamentally. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to describe it, but those memories that were buried so deep that they were more a feeling than anything else. From all I knew about magick, as the person who came up with how it worked, and the intent behind it, that should be borderline impossible to influence.
“What the hell am I even?” I muttered, more an idle comment than anything else.
It made sense that I had Vuthe’s soul, given that I had her scars. The only other option would be that I had suffered trauma on a similar level. Of course, I couldn’t be 100% certain that the scars I had were identical with the ones Vuthe was supposed to have. I hadn’t ever taken the time to describe many of them. But the ones I saw felt like they could fit. But even if they weren’t, that kind of trauma would be deadly to basically anyone. Very few could endure. And I really didn’t think I was the sort of person who could endure this much trauma without dying a thousand times over. Resilient wasn’t a word I would use to describe myself even in the wildest dreams.
I groaned, rubbing my face. This was so very confusing, and now I no longer knew what to think. Before I at least had the tacit understanding that I was me, and that despite all the chaos around me, that was something I had been able to rely on. Now I felt like I couldn’t even take my own memories, my own sense of self, for granted. This was exactly why I had chosen to make the souls the fundamental building block. To avoid these sorts of metaphysical issues.
Or perhaps in my attempt to create a system that would bypass those kinds of things, I had just made one that became very weird at the most basic levels. Kind of like quantum mechanics.
“Well, whatever… Not like I can do much about it anyway. And thinking about it further will just give me a headache.”
I grabbed the glass, then downed it in one gulp, before I turned to the bottle and drank from it directly. My mood had been pretty good so far, but this train of thought had soured the day for me quite drastically. Nothing seemed to make sense anymore, and every last bit of understanding I had about the world around me had just been called into question.
I supposed it was also entirely possible that this version of Satien didn’t adhere to the whole souls are unique rule. Wouldn’t be the first time that rule was broken. Hells, that had been the primary issue I had with the original version I had posted. And, at the end of the day, Abyss was involved. So who knew what the hell was going on.
When the bottle was empty I looked at it. I hadn’t even noticed how quickly I had guzzled it down. And I didn’t feel even the slightest bit tipsy yet.
“Fuck draconic poison resistence.”
And with this we conclude the daily chapters. From now on we return to our regularly scheduled program of one chapter each tuesday and friday at 5pm CET. Thank you for reading!
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