Unbound

The first thing he saw were the branches of an opalescent crystal tree, adorned with enough multi-colored leaves to put all of Nagast to shame. The Divine Tree, he’d been calling it, grown from a Vein of Divinity that he’d stolen from a goddess. He careened toward its bulk, the prismatic shine of its Essence leaves filling the darkness with a near-blinding radiance.

Kinda hard not to imagine I’m falling from my Cloudstep right now. About to hit snow and dirt, face first. Felix grinned as he flew, despite his thoughts. Eh. I’d survive it.

Gathering speed, Felix shot down through the bevy of branches, each one faceted and shimmering with a different color. Leaves scattered around him, turning from perfectly shaped oak, ash, and elm leaves into luminescent vapor—only to reform behind him to the sound of chiming bells.

Between his work on the Stronghold and his Skills, the thing he truly prided himself on that winter was the sheer volume of visualization he’d produced. As he burst from the upper boughs of his Divine Tree, Felix gazed upon the bounty of what he’d wrought—and it was beautiful.

It’s a funnel.

Quiet, you. I thought you were sleeping?

Mhmph, Pit mumbled sleepily.

Pit was accurate though, even if he had stolen the term from Felix originally. His entire core space had elevated, forming like a cyclone around his cores and Divine Tree, resembling an inverted pyramid. His Skills shone, each one an orb of swirling colors and dancing patterns that resembled nothing so much as planetary bodies floating in space. They moved, rotating imperceptibly around the circumference of the funnel, each one spinning in a unique dance of its own.

It’s a conduit, he reminded himself. Funnel sounds like I’m baking or assembling a beer bong.

The Skills themselves were grouped into larger patterns, like planets that had become tidally locked with one another. They were called Skill Arrays, and the strength they provided was not to be ignored. Felix had progressed a great deal with those as well—he had formed his Bastion Array and Shaping Array back before his confrontation with the Creature of Khasma, and he boasted even more now. They floated like glittering jewels around the circumference of his conduit, each one a song that Felix could sing if he wished.

Forsaken Array, Vigilant Array. Felix spotted each of them as he named them, checking their positions around his center. Concordance Array. Three formed in as many months.

Due to the sheer power the Skill Arrays required to establish their connections, not to mention the need for balance among the Array itself, Felix had taken his time crafting each of them. Karys and Zara had aided him in the beginning, helping him sort combinations in the most efficient ways. Karys’ advice had amounted to “get the rarest Skill you have and attach others that compliment it,” which would apparently effect the strongest boost to his abilities. Zara, on the other hand, had pointed out potential matches but warned him off the endeavor entirely. She had claimed it was too dangerous to tie his growth down, even for the boost the Skill Arrays might provide, as they were too inflexible were he to experience another spontaneous Skill evolution. Such a change would threaten the integrity of his other Skill patterns, perhaps leading to breaking or sundering completely. And that was discounting the possibility of regret—were he not happy with an Array, removing Skills from it was just as dangerous.

She certainly had a point, and Karys had agreed, but Felix had flabbergasted them both with a revelation shortly after the conflict in Haarwatch. He’d ignored their warnings and had adjusted his oldest Skill Array.

Bastion Array

Primary: Bastion of Will

Secondaries: Deep Mind, Skein of Fate, Chthonic Tribute

Tertiaries: Deception, Negotiation, Meditation

Felix had added Deception and Negotiation to it, and removed Voracious Eye, Aria of the Green Wilds, and Relentless Resolution. It had been…incredibly painful and Felix had danced upon the razor’s edge of consciousness the entire time. A combination of his powerful Willpower, stalwart Intent, and soaring Affinity saw him through, if a little worse for wear. The chamber he’d performed the separation in still bore the scars of Felix’s insensate spasms. He made sure not to show either of his advisors that particular bit of evidence.

Still, the results spoke for themselves, and after tweaking that first Skill Array, the System had retroactively recognized what he was doing and incorporated it into his display. Now all of them were viewable behind a tiny circular icon that faded from view unless he focused on it. It looked like a stylized solar system, white on blue. His other Skill Array was viewable as well, to which he’d added his newest shaping Skill, Hand of Calamity.

Shaping Array

Primary: Sovereign of Flesh

Secondaries: Cardinal Flame, Stone Shaping, Green Shaping, Auroral Forge, Rime Shaping, Hand of Calamity.

Tertiaries: Manasight, Theurgist of the Rise, Invocation, Dual Casting, Manaship Pilot

It was odd, but according to Kara, not the first time the System has made adjustments on the fly. While the Chant operated largely outside of the System’s control, their facility with it was still represented by their Harmonic Stats. It hadn’t always been so. Regardless, after proving his methods to Karys and Zara, they had abandoned trying to stop him. Felix had proceeded to assemble his three new arrangements.

Forsaken Array

Primary: The Song of Absolution

Secondaries: Abyssal Skein, Dodge, Armored Skin, Relentless Resolution

Tertiaries: Illusory Double, Heavy Armor Mastery

Vigilant Array

Primary: Voracious Eye

Secondaries: Aria of the Green Wilds, Exploration, Tracking

Tertiary: Alchemy, Blind Fighting

Concordance Array

Primary: Adamant Discord

Secondaries: Unite the Lost, Etheric Concordance, Ephemeral Evocation, Wild Threnody, Fiendforge

Tertiaries: Last Cry of the Chthonic Host, Manifestation of the Coronach

Each Array had been named by the System, though Felix had designated the groupings. Using Tempered Skills as Primaries had proven fruitful, especially as all were Epic or higher rarity. That afforded them more spaces for Secondary and Tertiary Skills to join in, supposedly increasing the overall strengthening effect. Aside from that requirement, the composition was one that Felix had ultimately had to feel out. The rhythms and patterns of each Skill had to be meshed carefully with all the others, in a way that didn’t invalidate their purpose. Harmony was the goal, creating a greater whole while avoiding as much Dissonance as he could.

His Forsaken Array was all about rejecting harm, and each Skill reflected that in some way. Aside from The Song of Absolution, his Dodge, Armored Skin, Relentless Resolution, and Abyssal Skein were the most directly related to that concept. That was why they were Secondaries. Illusory Double and Heavy Armor Mastery had commonalities but less than the rest—though an illusion and suit of armor could certainly help him avoid harm. Felix had been a bit surprised at Heavy Armor Mastery when he’d felt the resonance within it, considering it was his lowest leveled Skill by far and of Common rarity to boot. Still, it had slipped into the Array without issue, and more importantly, it felt right in a way Felix couldn’t verbalize.

The Vigilant Array was about perception and gathering of knowledge. Voracious Eye stood as Primary there, for obvious reasons, with Aria of the Green Wilds, Exploration, and Tracking as Secondaries. Sensing the natural world around him fed into the concept of the Array, feeding the pattern that had congealed around it. Blind Fighting was a bit of a departure, as was Alchemy, but the former was about preternatural perceptions and the latter was about using knowledge to learn even more. It all fit together like pieces of a puzzle.

The last, and most difficult Skill Array to form, had been his Concordance Array. The concept at the heart of it was connection, something Felix had been exploring more and more. Adamant Discord was the Primary, as it was the Skill that allowed Felix to manipulate the connections around himself to push and pull the world. Unite the Lost, Etheric Concordance, Ephemeral Evocation, Wild Threnody, and Fiendforge were all self explanatory. Each of them dealt with the unseen threads between people, power, and even memories. The Grand Harmony sang through them all, a unifying song so immense that Felix could only perceive it through the snippets of his Skills. For that same reason, Last Cry of the Chthonic Host and Manifestation of the Coronach were the Tertiary Skills in the Array. The latter was a strange exultation whenever Felix entered the fray, and the former was a piercing song that could bring him back from the edge of death.

Felix still hadn’t a clue where all that led, but he could not deny that the Skills had all but jumped into place once he’d brought them into alignment.

A number of his Skills were left untethered to any Array, mostly for lack of resonance with any others. A result of his eclectic variety of abilities, he supposed. Cloudstep, Shadow Whip, Sunken Ward, Mantle of the Infinite Revolution, Arrow of Perdition, and Rain of Cataclysm all stood out among the rotating walls of his core space. Lone, shining beacons in the endless dark, points of contrast from the clusters of Skill Arrays.

More Skills might make my collection complete…or make it more chaotic than ever. It wasn’t the first time he’d had that thought, and doubted it would be his last. Using his Ephemeral Evocation to extract Memories from monsters had been a focus for a bit, though he’d never received anything more useful than animalistic impressions. I need to fight more intelligent enemies, I think.

He refocused.

Following the massively thick trunk of the Divine Tree downward, Felix gazed upon his dual cores. They enveloped the trunk itself, stacked atop one another like two rings on the same finger, each one rotating in an opposing direction. Topmost was the red-gold [Cardinal Beast Core] followed by the blue-white [Thunderflame Core], each made of a gelatinous, slow moving flame that crackled ceaselessly with discharges of light and sound. The flames had thickened recently, and Zara and Karys both agreed that his Mana was beginning to condense further. Soon, they warned, one or both would crystallize, much like his Divine Tree.

A new threshold of power.

For now, those pieces of his cores spat outward as regularly as a beating heart, never stopping and never diminishing the cores’ sizes despite grinding endlessly together. Both of them hovered above the primary feature of Felix’s new core space. His Hunger sat at the narrowest part of his conduit. The sparks and sound shot in all directions, many of them upward and outward into the Tree and sides of his conduit, but all of it flowed down eventually. Into the black hole.

A halo of surging radiance and cacophonous sound spun around his Hunger, swirling at its greatest distance and lensing strangely over the expanse of darkness at its center. Anything Essence or Mana that came close was fuel for its endless appetite.

Hunger hadn’t spoken to him since Haarwatch, which made Felix nervous and strangely bereft. It had proven to be an ally, if an altogether strange one. Its last act before going silent was to give up the bulk of power it had consumed in order to fuel the weaving of Felix’s Pillars. He was still attempting to repay that sacrifice by consuming monsters and redesigning his core space. All the Essence he had gathered over the cold winter—and a good chunk of his own personal Mana—was being siphoned into the black hole. In fact, Felix had designed it all to work in that way. Power entered, catching and holding among the branches of his Divine Tree, refined by the Tree’s own nature and Felix’s Intent, before it spiraled outward among his Skills like barely-seen streamers of cosmic wind. In this way, the Essence was able to linger long enough to be of use to Felix, while eventually ending up at the bottom of his conduit, where his Hunger would devour what remained.

Felix even utilized the Seal he’d grown from the Divine Tree to further refine the shape of his giant funnel. Copied from the Seal of the Breach that they had found across Khasma, where the Creature had been locked away for long Ages. Felix had modified it a touch. Where before his copied Seal spread outward horizontally, now it clung just outside his spinning Skills vertically as well, like a trellis. Stems and budding roots climbed from tip to base, formed into a dense maze of sigladry and razor sharp tendrils.

It was reinforcement and threat; if Felix was going to keep on devouring monstrous abominations, he would need all the help he could get.

Compared to the others he had seen, Felix’s core space was titanically large. Perhaps he could have corrected this during his long visualization exercises, but there was little reason to do so. Others would struggle to utilize such vast amounts of space, but for Felix, it was almost the bare minimum to contain the forces he had incorporated within himself. A side effect of that, however, was a near constant need to replenish his Essence stores. That meant devouring monsters, cores, and magic often, so that his Hunger didn’t deplete him of his strength when he needed it most.

A work in progress.

Below the warped space around his Hunger, the roots of his Divine Tree extended further still. They were among the only things that could approach that abyss, and yet the roots were not unchanged. Still crystalline, still opalescent, the colors nevertheless muted. Dulled, as if a piece of vitality had been leached away.

His Hunger stripped even the Divine, which was fortunate. The Creature couldn’t face it and live, and if Felix played his cards right, nothing else would be able to either. He might be gearing up to face the might of the Hierocracy and their grandmasters, but he had experienced enough rare encounters to rightfully fear the true monsters out there.

The roots continued down, combining with cords of light that split through the bottom of his conduit before all of them wove together into nine Pillars, each as thick as his Divine Tree. This was the mark of Felix’s advancement. One’s foundational Pillars were to be woven before one could attempt Grandmaster Tier, and Felix had them ready well before he reached Master. Their completion had boosted his stats to a large degree, but more importantly, they had increased his capacity for significance by a wide margin.

Significance was a strange thing. Like Essence, there was no meter to gauge how much he contained at any one time, though he could sense the edges of it to an extent. Also like Essence, Felix was equipped with methods that allowed him to drain others of a portion of their significance. It was a measurement of a person’s solidity within the universe, a sort of gravity that grounded people. The greater their power and advancement, the greater the significance they would accumulate. Eventually, he was told, it all crystallized. Who you were would become immutable. Immortal, perhaps.

For his part, Felix was certain he would require far more significance than others to truly reach that point. Whether that was because of his expanded Skill set, his high stats, or even just his Unbound nature didn’t really matter. At that point, the only part of him that felt “fixed” were his nine Pillars and the star lattice that sealed their base.

The foundation was surrounded and engulfed in a crystalline lattice that anchored the Pillars to whatever amounted to a floor in his core space. It wasn’t as refined as the “air” inside his conduit, where Felix had spent months visualizing exactly what he wanted. The unfocused, almost dirty dark served as a boundary of sorts, where lattices of silver crystal further secured the bases of all nine of his Pillars.

That had been another gift of Felix’s Hunger, a deluge of pure power that had pushed the final Pillars over the edge. Each Pillar had been woven from his Tempered Skills, his dual cores, and the thinnest of threads from the consumed slivers of two separate goddesses. They were braided with a complexity that boggled Felix’s vision whenever he tried to trace them out, for all that he wove most of them. The last few, however, had been formed by Pit.

You did a good job, bud, Felix sent, but received no reply. He focused for a moment, tapping into the Link that connected them, and heard the tenku snoring away.

Felix left him alone.

All in all, his core space was looking good and operating just as he had visualized it to do so. The only real question was what that damned fist was all about.

It’s powerful, I know that. The first emergence of that conjured fist had resulted in the Creature’s final defeat. Except now it had tried to emerge from his core space entirely. I don’t even see it here. Is it hiding?

Felix hesitated to attempt another summoning of it—he had no clue what it would do to the environment around him, or how to contain its clear power. There were hunters and foragers in the forest below him. Felix would need a large, empty space to truly test it out.

Or I could suck it up and ask Zara about it, he chided himself.

The Naiad Sorcerer had proven herself trustworthy a dozen times over, but her ties to the Chanters made Felix uncomfortable. He’d grown used to Zara after months, but then the revelation that he was expected to fight the Ruin—a civilization killing abomination that erased history itself—had set him back on his heels. Then, of course, Isla had entered the mix and set everything back further. If the diminutive healer represented how the Cantus Sodalus operated, Felix was not keen on involving them in his business. The woman’s continued efforts to meddle around his Stronghold only solidified his distrust…and Zara’s refusal to step in made him newly wary of her intentions as well.

So talking to the Chanters about his innermost workings was off the table for now. Karys had plenty of insight, but it was full of holes. He knew the Pillars were good, the Skill Arrays were strong, and the mere presence of crystallized Mana in his core space at all was a sign of great things to come…but the larger significance was lost.

I suppose I can ask him about the fist, at least. Not like he’s going to tell anyone.

“Felix? My Lord, are you there?”

Felix blinked back to reality, his core space fading as the world restored itself around him. Green-gold Mana vapor oozed from his Inheritor’s Will, buzzing with the voice of his Chancellor. “Speak of the devil. What is it, Karys?”

“It’s Kimaris. She has made contact with the Witches of Cold Rock.”

“Ooh. That was fast.” Felix weighed his options. He had a meeting with Zara, one he’d put off more than a few times already…but Kimaris’ mission was important. He nodded. “Be there in a second.”

Within his chest, a series of chords rang out as he sounded a Skill. Harmony and Dissonance wound around each other in equal measure, guided by his Affinity and shaped by his Intent as it spooled through his pathways and out of the Mana Gates in his palms. All of it took less than a faction of a second.

Adamant Discord!

Connections between here and there, between Felix and Karys, went from ephemeral to hardened steel beams. Felix grasped them, letting lightning course across his fingers, and pulled.

He shot off into the sky, a wake of blistering sound trailing behind him.