Published at 4th of December 2019 10:46 am

Volume 2, Part V: Chapter 13

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

To the west, an orange sunset blazed, bathing the spiral high rise in its rays and creating a long shadow pointing to the east. Aozaki Tōko stands just outside of the apartment building’s garden as all the city contents itself with the approach of twilight. Her immense brown trench coat doesn’t suit her small frame at all, worn more like armor than an article of clothing. She gives the high rise’s top floor one short glance before taking her orange briefcase in one hand and striding through the greenery of the garden and entering the building itself.

The glass walls of the entrance let in a trace of the sunset, dyeing the walls and floor just beside it in a color as red as the sun it emanates from. After sparing a moment for a final sigh, she walks forward, then upon reaching the central elevator, turns abruptly toward the right, heading to the east lobby.

She remembers it from the last time she was here, its semi-circular shape and stairs to a second floor reminding her how large the room is. Here, the violent redness of outside can no longer be found, replaced instead with yellow lights shining on the marble floor and the cheaply painted walls.

“What a surprise! You are quite easy to incite after all, Aozaki.” The statement echoes in the lobby, said by a man in a high toned voice. Saying nothing, Tōko instead directs her attention to the gently sloping stairs at the center of it all, where the man in a red coat stands in one of the steps. “But it is, of course, a surprise of the welcome variety. I welcome you, master puppeteer, to my gehenna.”

Cornelius Alba’s smile displays his teeth, and with a similarly grandiose gesture, bows from his waist.

“Gehenna?” Tōko asks with eyebrow cocked.

“Appropriate, isn’t it? This is a place much like that ancient valley where Baalites once threw their children into the roasting fires, though unfortunately the god Moloch is not here with us now. It’s a reality so splendidly demarcated from the consensus of the masses, and here we carve our path to ascension.”

He has his eyes cast downward at Tōko as he speaks in triumph. But she doesn’t give the man any room to read her when she replies.

“Hardly a surprise that the descendant of Cornelius Agrippa is a probable Judaizer. Unlike you though, I imagine Agrippa would have divined the true purpose to this place. And if you want to see the slaughter and wailing and gnashing of teeth that you love so much, I suggest you make a quick stop in Kosovo or the Congo. Your pitiful operation is nothing compared to that.” Tōko sets her briefcase down on the floor, producing a dry clicking sound. “This place is nothing but a purgatory where none of the souls pass on, where endless suffering is the end goal and not the punishment. This isn’t divine, nor is it magic, at least not coming from someone like you.”

The red coated mage’s face betrays only a small twitch of muscle at her words. Tōko looks at Alba, but also beyond him, as if her opponent was not the man but the very building itself.

“Now,” Tōko continues, “let’s drop the pretense that it’s you who came up with this Taijitu idea and just make Alaya show his face already. You have little business with what will soon occur. I don’t know your real reason for being here, but it’s likely it has little to do with any higher arcane goals. Just giving you a fair warning in return for the one you gave me.”

Tōko casts her eyes around the walls, searching for an unseen enemy, while never returning her glance to Alba. The red coated mage looks upon her with murder and what may be the prelude to tears in his eyes.

“You were always like this,” he murmurs. “Yes, you’re always like this!” Louder now. “You always looked down on me. I studied runes before you did, studied the Art of dolls and puppeteering well in advance of you. But oh, how you fooled those imbeciles in the Collegium into thinking you were better, that you were more creative. But we both know the truth. I’m the inheritor of Sponheim Abbey, after all! After my forty years of scholarship in the Art, a mage no older than a teenager has no business even being recognized by me!”

Somewhere in his tirade, the murmur turned into an agitated bellowing that echoes in the lobby. Tōko stares uninterestedly at this man who has abandoned his niceties so neatly only to insult her thoroughly.

“Age isn’t a factor in academics, you know,” Tōko replies. “And Cornelius, don’t get me wrong, I think taking time to look younger is alright, but you’re so focused on it that your Art loses its touch, I think.” She delivers it calmly, and yet this is perhaps the worst precision guided insult she can ever throw at him. The face that once looked like it belonged to a young man now twists with hatred, returning him to his appropriate age.

“I haven’t said why I came here in the first place, have I?” With a deep breath, Alba regains composure. “I have no interest in Alaya’s little experiment, nor do I share his goal in reaching the Akasha, that numinous concept that may or may not exist. I see no reason why one needs to swim upstream to attain gnosis and ascension.” He withdraws one step upward. “Telling you about Shiki Ryōgi was my idea. The old man Alaya put himself in harm’s way to capture the little girl. Offed themselves about the same time, I suppose. And so, this domain is mine until the structure twists time and returns him to his previous state, but I have no intention of continuing Alaya’s work. I don’t suppose you’ve figured it out, but I came here to your little edge of the world, just so I could kill you, Aozaki!”

Alba hisses her name, like a curse that could destroy his very ability to speak. He runs to the top of the stairs to the second floor balcony, and Tōko only looks on curiously. From the walls flow a curious substance that appears to be liquid, sharing its cream color with the walls it clings to.

“Playing your tulpas, huh?” Tōko utters in a mix of bemusement and scorn. With astonishing quickness, the substance oozes down from the walls and into the first floor where Tōko is standing dead center. As it nears the floor, it starts to coalesce in different places, in different forms: some humanoid, some beast like, all quite real. Their surface resembles keloid, and their mass constantly shifts, a face here and there, or some barely recognizable animal, appearing as though they are in a constant state of perfect, if unsightly, decay.

“Not the best tulpas I’ve seen Alba, but not entirely surprising. Hey, maybe you can be a special effects guy! I mean, of course you’d be limited to creature features and Hammer horrors, but it’s better than sitting around in an old abbey, right?” She shouts at Alba even as the things inch ever closer to her.

Well, maybe this is a horror movie of some sort, Tōko thinks. Not the kind where the problem is solved with a cross or a shotgun, though. With barely two meters left separating her from the slowly advancing “tulpas”, she stands stoic, reaching instinctively for the absent pack of cigarettes in her breast pocket. Fuck, that’s right, Mikiya’s got them. Should’ve bought some Japanese brands on my way here. Well, we all have to make sacrifices once in a while, even for something as boring as this display of Art.

“On second thought, Alba, maybe Hollywood isn’t your calling after all,” Tōko yells out loud. “There’s a much more discerning audience now. Creature design workshop time! Let’s see if we can’t teach you a thing or two!” With an unexpected motion, she kicks the briefcase she had set down on the floor next to her earlier.

“OUT!” With one word, her voice booms, containing an authority that brooks no refusal. At the mere mention of the word, the bag opens, revealing itself to be empty. And yet, something black forms a tight perimeter around Tōko Aozaki. Like a dark whirlwind given form, and Tōko right in the calm eye of the storm, the black object spins round and round, wider and wider, its speed blinding both her and Alba to its true form. In the space of a few seconds, the tulpas are completely gone, with nary a trace of the ooze.

Still standing at the center of it all, having barely moved from her original position, is Tōko Aozaki. Beside her lie the open, empty briefcase…and a cat, peacefully relaxing. Alba can only stare at it in a daze. The cat stands taller than Tōko, even as it sits, and its body is pitch black, without a trace of warmth on its surface. A cat made from shadow, whose only distinguishing feature is the pair of eyes it possesses, resembling a hieroglyph.

“What in the hell is that thing?” Alba says, incredulously glaring at the cat. Their eyes meet. And though both he and Tōko know there is no other distinguishable feature on its “face,” he feels the creature smile at him. Alba looks for all the world like he’s just seen a nightmare, but Tōko keeps her silence. Somewhere, a steady metronomic scratching fills a tempo to the dead air. “So the rumors I heard were wrong? Your sister mage didn’t destroy your familiar?” he asks in disbelief, unable to withstand the growing silence.

“Let’s not start throwing around libelous accusations at your sources now, whoever they may be.” Then she directs her attention to the silhouette of the cat beside her, raising a hand to pat it gently, and saying in cloying words, “Good girl. Human meat is the next item for dinner, which should be much better than the pile of tulpas fashioned from prima materia that you just swallowed. This one is more nutritious. Don’t restrain yourself. After all, he’s one of my friends from the old days. Remember all those times I told you how tasty they are?”

In an instant, the black silhouette is off, seemingly gliding above the marble floor to the foot of the stairs, manifesting the same haste that it had done only a moment before, taking no more than ten seconds to reach the first step. Its feet do not appear to be moving, or at least mortal vision presents it as such. But Alba, like Tōko, sees like no mortal, and a mage cannot be brought low so simply. Before the shadow cat had even begun to move, Alba had already begun to weave a spell.

“False shadow, who can neither touch nor see, let the light of my Art cast you into oblivion!”

With a calmness belying his current predicament, Alba recites the words, the incantations called lorica which many mages use to decorate the weaving of their Art. The lorica and the expression is a mage’s own, colored by his choice and personality, a way to channel the Art through a mnemonic familiar to the paradigm of their mind. The goal is a sort of autohypnosis; coercing themselves into a state of mind that enhances a spell’s potency so they can better manipulate the rules of the material world. Impressive, Tōko thinks. He actually cut down on the excessive five-line loricas from way back. Didn’t even take two seconds. Guess he can improve. Yet Tōko only expresses her praise through a snort in his direction. “Let my will be my fist and strike you down.”

He gestures, arm outstretched, in the direction of the shadow closing with him, just arriving at the foot of the stairs. When it reaches the first step, the very air rumbles, and the lobby instantly becomes noticeably hotter. Willed into existence right before his eyes, Alba conjures a pillar of blue flame, undulating like a mirage of a geyser and consuming the stairway. Stretching from the floor and to the ceiling it soon bursts through, it starts to rob the room of its oxygen, and the shadow that would have climbed the stairs to assault Alba can no longer be seen. No animal can survive that heat; the temperature is high enough to reduce any common solid object to nothingness.

In moments, the pillar of flame dies, but what Alba sees in its wake makes his blue eyes widen.

“Impossible,” he mentions, for in the middle of the charred stairway is the black familiar, licking itself as though the spell had produced a good sensation. It locks eyes with him for a moment, and then resumes it charge toward Alba. He spares no hesitation. “Again!”

Alba repeats the spell, noticeably weaker this time without the benefit of the lorica. The blue pillar appears again, but the familiar is no longer held at bay. Alba can almost see the flames pass over it and through it as the creature races toward him in a straight, unwavering course. “Again!”

Flames appear and disappear yet another time. The cat familiar nears its prey. “Again!”

The fourth time is as ineffective as the first. With the cat safely on the second floor, it approaches Alba and it opens itself, its entire larger-thanman sum breaking open from head to toe like a tulip, losing any semblance of a cat. With what could be termed its insides, Alba can see the tulpas he had vested so much hope in earlier clinging to the walls of the cavity, and he finally realizes that this familiar is nothing more than a mouth, an object that consumes that has simply taken the shape of a cat. “Aga—”

Facing death, Alba risks one last attempt to weave a spell, but before he finishes, the thing takes him in its mouth, the cavity grasping him by the red coat hanging on his shoulders. The blackness of the shadow is the last thing he can remember before he sinks into oblivion.

“Ōken.”

A third voice is heard, and a lorica echoes throughout the lobby.

At the word’s utterance, the shadow familiar that has Alba by the scruff of the neck immediately halts. Even Tōko knows enough about the owner of the voice to face it the moment she heard it. Behind Alba stands a man, burdened with eyes of perpetual melancholy and rigidity and wearing a black greatcoat. He stands stock still as though he was observing the entire time, and yet one cannot find any traces of his sudden appearance. The man retrieves Alba with one arm, and then unceremoniously casts him away, setting him down on the ground. The cat familiar, having stepped onto the curious tri-circular geometry describing a perimeter around the man, is still as a stone. When the man finally notices Tōko, she feels the air become noticeably colder, losing the slack it held seconds ago, though she’d like to think that it’s just her imagination. The structure itself seems to tense to welcome its true master.

“Aozaki. You have changed much. Has it been so long?” “It has. I wish it could’ve been longer.”

The man known as Sōren Alaya descends the blackened steps, ash still falling from the ceiling drifting down to rest on his shoulders, and Tōko’s familiar seemingly being strung along by the spell that surrounds him. He remains on the first step of the stairs, forcing Tōko to angle her head slightly upward to face him.

“Alba has overstepped his bounds. I had intended for this experiment to pass without your notice. This encounter is a curious coincidence, but perhaps inevitable.”

“Ah, coincidence,” Tōko sighs, “the convenient word we use to blind ourselves from the sacred mystery play of fate.” She slowly retreats back to the wall as she speaks to buy time. Sōren is different from Alba. Though their facility with the Art may rate similarly, Sōren Alaya has home court advantage here in his sanctum. She keeps her attention directed forward even as she falls back, watching for any openings she can exploit even as she knows Alaya is doing the same.

“So tell me, what’s up with your Schrödinger’s mansion?” she muses. “You do already know that killing a whole bunch of people to build up a resonance of death to reach the origin has been proven impossible quite spectacularly before, right?”

“I know the history. But I also know a truth you are not privy to. I too was blinded by the success that sheer numbers seemed to promise. Given enough men, I would come upon a soul I could latch onto in its passing of the threshold, and follow its return to the spiral of origin. But I was denied, for I looked to the number, not the manner of death. And so I studied the deaths, and as the hexagrams of the I Ching prescribe, I was able to discern the sixty-four manners of death, of which each resident of this domain corresponds to. What I have here is a microcosm of the universe. I witness their anguish, and record its significance, and in time, perhaps reality and my will may transmute the sixty-four hexagrams into the eight, and that into the four shishō, and that into the pair of extremes that is the ryōgi, and finally into the Akasha, the great origin.”

“Man, Alaya, this whole business of fashioning things into the whole is consuming you bad. You indulge your occult Arts, missing the true point of the ryōgi polarity: that opposites aren’t that way because of conflict, but because of dynamism. Opposites define each other, which is why they aren’t a whole. You place such a premium on the totality of death, give such importance to its chronicling that you’re forgetting the life that gave them their worth. Look at yourself! This St. Peter with the book of life thing you got going will only destroy you.”

“It does not matter whether I die or not. Only reaching the origin for my purposes drives me now.” His words are confident, unwavering. He truly believes in his self-appointed duty.

This building, with its self-contained spiral of death and rebirth, has existed for so long outside of consensus, it has become its own separate reality. This place is his temple, an extension of him, and his tie to it is so strong it bows to his will, Tōko thinks. The entire place reeks with the resonance of the hatred the people here can no longer give voice to. It’s sickening, and Alaya is making it stronger every day, with deaths that never get the opportunity to pass the threshold every time.

Deaths of silence borne from lovers and family, of father, mother, and the quiet march of time.

Deaths of malice borne from lovers and family, of friends, colleagues, and the conflicting hatred of strangers.

Alba was right about one thing: all of this—the confluence of all this corrupted energy, all the mana the structure is heaving forth from the land, all the death—is one big sacrificial altar, framed in fearful symmetry, all for Alaya’s crazy dream. And Tōko finally realizes that this is something far beyond the realm of simple tricks that the Art can offer, but well into the domain of rumored sorcery, the pure magic, the product of true gnosis beyond the reach of mortal hands, and for the first time, she doubts herself.

“How can this thing stand without the consensus of humanity tearing it apart? Something should have happened by now. At this point the Deterrent should already have made its play, moving an individual as its agent, triggering events that will cause your downfall one way or another. Why is there no one?” Tōko asks with doubt and curiosity.

“Have you not asked yourself why you yourself are in this city? Why a man would find himself burgling that particular house? Why a woman would, in her dying moments, stumble clumsily inside this building? I have kept this experiment as covert as possible, and yet here we have signs of the Deterrent working against me. I once tried to find a way to fool it, but it is all, as I realized, temporary. I simply did not have the ability.” For the first time, there is something akin to disappointment in his tone. He keeps his intensity focused on Tōko, and sees nothing but her. “Any man thinks himself less once he realizes he is no less potent than any animal. Men strive for perfection, but are denied so by the consensus, a paradox that forms the theme of our lives: existing to climb ever higher heights, but rejecting the task only to exist.

“The mages who have ascended—the ones who have reached the origin—had no will to power, but instead were given that power by the deterministic properties that entropy imposes on our reality. When one speaks of ability, one truly speaks only of fate, of the prefabricated decisions, capabilities, and choices that shape our lives. We humans who have inherited the potential to ascend have fallen so far into this material world, our nature scattered and pluralized, separated from the power that is our birthright. And so I realized that while I may not have the ability to thwart the Deterrent and realize the path to the spiral of origin, I only need find someone in the multitudes that can. I needed only one empty soul, whose nature tied it back to the indescribable ‘ ’. It has taken me many years—”

“But you found her. And her name is Shiki Ryōgi.” Tōko wonders briefly if the Ryōgi dynasty even knew what the dangerous progeny of their lineage implied and was truly capable of becoming. “Then you used Kirie Fujō and Asagami Fujino as bait to lure Shiki in without attracting the Deterrent to your scent. You hold two broken mirrors up to her to make her realize what she is. Got a hand it to you, there’s no better teacher than experience. Your gameplan for Shiki still isn’t clear, though. What’s it going to be? Bringing Shiki back from the dead? Or did you just kidnap her for a social call?”

“What I did two years ago only set the destiny that had been forged for Shiki Ryōgi into motion. A solution has presented itself. She has no need of that body, and I will take it for my own purposes.”

“Wait a minute. Don’t tell me you want to transfer your soul…” Tōko’s voice trails off, her index finger connecting invisible dots in the air until it

finally makes sense to her. Alaya sees no need to answer, believing it to be obvious. Finally, Tōko says, “You’re sick, you know that? But since you’re still here, I suppose Shiki’s still alright. I don’t think it’s in bad form to ask if you’ll just give her back to me?”

“If that is your desire, then come and claim her.”

“So a duel, I expect. And I don’t fancy myself the violent type either. These are the punches I need to roll with when I decided to take her in, I suppose.”

“I do not think it is in bad form to ask if you will not work with me in this endeavor?” Alaya pleads, though his hostile demeanor does not budge an inch. Tōko answers her with a sly smile, lowering her head politely and closing her amber eyes as if she had just made a regrettable but necessary decision. “I see,” Alaya continues. “I thought that would be your answer. It is a shame that it has to be so. There was a time when we were both driven to seek the origin. I truly miss that part of you.” Alaya moves a step forward, accompanied by its echoing tap on the marble floor as he finally descends to the first floor. “You were different from the other mages in the Collegium. Ambitious. Perhaps even as obsessed as any able philosopher would be. Yours was the path of the material, while mine was the path of the soul. I had even thought, that in our lives spent chasing after our goal, you would be first. But you abandoned your calling. You do not even carry yourself as a mage would anymore. It mystifies me. For what else do we mages study and seize power if not for ascension? Why concern yourself with this pointless self-exile in this country?” Only his eyes communicate his anger and frustration, but with everything else about him, he remains still.

Tōko shrugs and smiles. “There’s nothing really special about it. I just got tired of the whole cosmic game, filled to the brim with paradoxes as it was. The more you learn, it just seems you realize that you’ve just grown dumber. Like you know how they say the clearest path to ascension is an empty mind, but if that was the case, you wouldn’t even be aware of the spiral of origin in the first place? Yeah, shit like that. I accepted it and moved on. You haven’t. Seems to be the biggest difference, though.” She sighs through the last sentence, and the confession seems all the more melancholic for it. Now they stand and look upon each other on equal footing.

“Then you have fallen into a lie,” Alaya says, his voice falling into a tone of all the regret he can muster. “It does not, however, answer why you are here.”

“You’ve gone too far to even realize it now. And I’m telling you, it’s not entirely about Shiki either. Girl’s practically a mystery that even I can’t unravel. Dollars to donuts she finds her own way out of here.” Tōko briefly entertains the idea of being someone unknowingly influenced by the Deterrent, but she quickly dispels it. I’m no hero, she thinks, not that it matters. The only thing she accepts is her own life, built from the coincidences and crossed paths that may never happen again, even if she lived somewhere as iterative as this structural embodiment of paradox. Her resolve is borne only out of an inclination to protect it.

“Alaya, you must think me weak. And maybe you would be right. I’ve come to hold the concept of the solitary sage as an ideal, an individual with power tempered by wisdom, isolated and alone. But I know I’ll never really achieve it, with all the sins and baggage in my closet. Mages build their chantries to close themselves off, thinking themselves above the rabble, and yet retain their grip on their previous humanity in tiny, but noticeable ways. They toil with their ars magna, a Great Work, the final key to their labors, but for what? An abstract dream of ascension? For a fake sense of a greater good? Then where are these ‘enlightened’ despots, guiding our journey in the material world? Is it you? You think you’re pure while the mortals are unclean. Bullshit. You shut your eyes to the blood on your hands that brands you a criminal and a disgrace, all the while calling yourself ‘special’ and the true savior of this slowly ebbing reality. I once thought like you, but then I wised up down the line. Face it, Alaya. Mages entertain their obsessions of ascension and pneumatological delusions because we’re the ones that are weak.”

The black clad mage sees fit not to speak, the best thing that passes as contemplation for him. He only continues to move forward one step at a time toward Tōko, until he says, “Even if you are right, there is no turning back on the path that leads me closer every moment to the origin. Your actions and opposition force me to acknowledge you as the Deterrent’s will manifest. In the end, Aozaki, the lie has tempered your ambition. It is disappointing that you were still human, in the end.”

Tōko notes that reality inside the building shifts perceptibly along the concepts of Alaya’s mind. From afar, mage and mage end the long discourse that fill the hole of the long years of each other’s absence with a two final statements, recited almost like a prayer, a chant with the weight of tradition to it.

“What do you seek, Alaya?” “True wisdom.”

“Where do you seek it, Alaya?” “Nowhere else but within me.”

His footsteps halt near the center of the lobby. Together, they begin their opening gambits in a match that seeks to expunge the other from the world altogether.

Tōko places a foot atop her fallen briefcase, carefully studying how Alaya will conduct his attack. Behind him, her black cat familiar is in complete stasis, unable to defeat the magic of Alaya’s ward. Tōko remembers it, and the component thaumaturgical processes by which it is formed, all of which Alaya named after phrases and traditional mantras: fugu, kongō, dakatsu, taiten, chōgyō, and ōken. Together they form a potent ward that envelops the space around him, halting the movements of any who step within that cannot overcome its magic. Normally, such a ward cannot be moved, establishing a simple boundary, but somehow he has found a way to violate this rule, and thus became a formidable enemy, stymieing any efforts to fight him in close combat, not to mention the other Arts with which he handles projectiles.

Unlike Alba, both Tōko and Alaya never incorporated their Art of manipulating and shaping matter to compel it to an offensive purpose. And yet, even within Tōko’s favored rune Art, there are ways. Tōko need only write “sōwilō”, the rune for fire, and she can shape it into reality. Normally, she can write it from afar, in the air if she wanted, but any mage can spot the casting and stop it. For it to work, she needs to get up close and write it directly on his body, but Alaya’s wards are denying her that option.

Tōko curses her inflexibility in the Art in this pivotal moment, but as far she knows Alaya is in a similar position, unless he has learned a thing or two in the years they’ve been apart. She had chosen crafting dolls as her metaphor for ascension, while he had chosen the study of death. Besides this, Tōko is aware of the skill Alaya can bring to bear even without the Art, as even he has seen his fair share of wars. Knowing this, Tōko has no other option except to play it defensively and attempt to lure him to the trap she had set here some time before.

Alaya makes his move. He extends his left arm toward Tōko, palm out, like a man calling out to someone on a distant horizon, and his hand makes only the slightest twitch.

“SHUKU,” he recites. He clenches his palm into a fist in time with the lorica with a crushing weight. Simultaneously, Tōko is struck back with a sudden force, the enchanted coat she had relied on to protect her from attack being torn in a visibly radial pattern around her center of mass. The attack makes her fall to one knee on the ground. It only takes Tōko a moment to know what Alaya did: he manipulated the space she occupied, distorting distances and creating a tear that crushed the very air she stood upon. She is surprised; even space is within his mastery now. The building and the influence his will has upon the area must certainly be helping him cast such an Art with ease.

“Damn it,” Tōko coughs out, a few precious droplets of blood escaping her lips. She forces down the rest of the bloody lump rising in her throat. “How many bones did I pay for that one?” Right now, she envies the physical endurance that Shiki has demonstrated time and again. She has no time to know how extensive the damage to her body is, but she does know that her coat took the brunt of it, but that’s all. One more of that, and it’s all over.

“GO!” She orders, her own lorica tinged with magic. The shadow familiar stirs, reacting to it. It seems it could move through Alaya’s wards after all, revealing its state of rest as an elaborate act. Tōko can almost feel what can be described as an emotion of relief emanate from it when she unleashes the order to attack.

“What—” Alaya let’s slip a moment of surprise as he turns his head over his shoulder to react. With barely a hair’s breadth of distance between him and the familiar, Alaya manages to perform the same trick twice, crushing the space directly in front of the hand he raises to meet the approaching attacker. Before the shadow familiar falls into the affected space however, it evades and changes its direction midflight, directing itself to the ceiling where it lands its cat paws and hangs upside down in defiance of common gravity.

“Enough of this,” declares Alaya with rising confidence. He raises his other hand and directs it at the ceiling even before the familiar finds purchase upon it, predicting its course. By the time the shadow lands, Alaya has already woven his Art. The spell crushes that portion of the ceiling, and the cat along with it. He watches as the shadow seemingly folds into itself in mere moments until it can no longer be seen, presumably crushed. The spell leaves only a small gap in the ceiling where the cat once was.

“Your rook is disposed of and the king checked. Was it not you who said that a mage that relies overmuch on his pieces loses the battle when the pieces are destroyed?” Alaya mocks. He returns his attention to Tōko, arm still extended and palm open. Tōko returns to him a look of dissatisfaction.

“I’m touched that you remember that. I’ve walked right into your little magic trap of a building just to reminisce about old times right to the end. How could you have ever lost to that little twerp Shiki with something as potent as this place?”

“Had I been less careful, I would not have captured her alive, which was my objective. But for you, no such safeguards need hinder me.”

“I didn’t know you had it in you to go to such lengths for the body of a girl, Alaya.” She leans an arm heavily on the wall beside her. “I swear, you and Alba have no cinematic sense for suspense. Let me tell you how to do it. Firstly, the monster shouldn’t talk. Second, don’t explain what it is. Third, it can’t die.”

The last sentence brings a moment of realization to Alaya’s face before he looks back over his shoulder. Sure enough, hanging over the hole in the ceiling is the cat familiar, with no visible injuries to its credit.

“Shuku!” Alaya lashes his arm out to aim his spell at the familiar as fast as he can, but it is no use. The familiar neatly skirts the spell as it jumps out of the way and toward the black-clad mage. Flying like a loosed arrow, the familiar opens its body up in the same shape of the mouth it had donned when consuming Alba, and a moment later, Alaya is caught in the cavity. Only a faint intake of breath, an indication of surprise perhaps, escapes Alaya’s lips before he is devoured and snapped cleanly in two by the creature’s jaw. Only Alaya’s shoulder and head remain, tossed aside violently by the thrice grown shadow and hitting the staircase, rolling downwards with low, dull thuds. Tōko observes the expression of dim horror that color his face in his final moments before speaking to herself.

“Mages really should read some Clausewitz along with their hermetic texts. That’s how you do a surprise attack, Alaya.” She pushes herself off the wall and starts to walk closer to her dispatched foe.

Until she hears a cruel, crunching noise. She ascribes it at first to some far off location, at least until deep crimson blood is expelled from her lips, coughed and vomited out. With vision growing steadily hazier, she casts her eyes downward, only to find an arm, conspicuously sticking out of her own body. Tōko Aozaki doesn’t know what to make heads or tails of it at first, but she soon comes to the realization that the arm wrapped thick with blood is a man’s arm, and that the object its accompanying hand grasped is a heart.

Her heart.

And it is then that she finally realizes. From behind her, a voice whispers into her ear.

“You are correct. Insight can be found in the most unlikely places.” The voice is burdened with great grief, regret, and hatred; Sōren Alaya’s voice, without a doubt.

With blood escaping her mouth in narrow rivulets, Tōko asks, “That… was a puppet, wasn’t it? A decoy—”

“Yes.” Alaya holds her close, his eyes taking in the sight of her heart.

“But you are quite real. The fury in this heart is unmistakable. It is almost too beautiful to destroy.” And yet, with an ease that makes the organ seem to have the consistency of nothing harder than a water bag full to bursting, he crushes the heart with his hand, and watches the blood seep through his fingers. “I divined the trick to your familiar. It did not come from the briefcase, did it? It was a mere projection.”

The briefcase then collapses, the Art used to cloak its nature now gone. In its place lies a projector, still making noises as it settles clankily on the floor.

“Ingenious,” he remarks. “An artifact of the prima materia, projecting a tangible creature. It is no wonder now why my Art was ineffective. It was foolish of me not to have seen it earlier.”

Tōko doesn’t waste her last breaths answering him. Only questions come to her lips; questions for her former friend and murderer.

“I didn’t…get to finish earlier. The last question: What is it you desire, Alaya?”

“I do not desire.”

They utter the same questions and confront the same answers that had haunted them for years, and the familiarity somehow gives Tōko the last force of will to chuckle, each expelling of breath accompanied by blood blossoming in the air.

I do not desire. Tōko remembers the words. It didn’t seem too long ago now when she was a Collegium whelp, and Alaya not much more than that. When a master asked the assembled neophytes the same question, they mentioned outlandish and fantastical dreams of glory and discovery. But Alaya expressed himself differently. I do not desire. Though the neophytes took it as a sign of a lack of avarice in him and laughed, Tōko found nothing to take lightly in that reply. Only a vague feeling of dread. He was right in the sense that he did not desire. He took ascension as a mission, beyond the petty godly ambitions of other mages, and into something more personal that he hid well within him: a deep and abiding hatred for the paradox of humanity.

“Alaya…there’s one last piece of advice you need to know.” “I will listen. Hurry, you have precious few seconds left.”

“You don’t know what you’re trying to kill with this experiment.” The only strength Tōko has left she directs to her speech, and her mouth moves in quivering movements that slur her speech somewhat. “Gunning for the Akashic Record means you’re going to have to take down the Deterrent, the combined consensus of humanity’s will, and the world’s tendency for homeostasis.”

“And what of it?”

Tōko’s choking and coughing fills the air, but she says her next statement as clearly as she can. “Think real hard about which of the two forces you’re really fighting.”

“A joke, surely. I have long since accepted my conflict with humanity’s unified unconscious will.

“That’s the tune of about six billion people. Do you think you control all of them, right up to their death? Do you think your conviction will make you win?”

“I do,” he replies abruptly, without hesitation or exaggeration. The worst part, Tōko thinks, is that Alaya may actually be able do it. The confidence of his declaration, despite the knowledge of his difficult undertaking, says as much. The last hope she can have is a faint one, but she places her faith in it nonetheless: the sheer force of paradox that may shatter his path to hubris in a manner even he could not have accounted for.

“I pity you, Alaya.”

“Why?” He asks, but before he is able to receive an answer, Tōko’s life finally expires before him, leaving the body a worthless husk. Alaya thinks it a shame to allow her brain to rot away as the rest of her body. Better to preserve it, perhaps. And then study it. He withdraws the arm that pierced through Tōko’s flesh and places it atop the head, the other hand firmly grasping the dead face. With a simple twist, and the sound of crunching bone, he severs the head, leaving the body to fall lazily down against the floor.

Holding the head on one hand, he retreats to the wall Tōko previously leaned on, the same wall from whence he came. Despite Tōko’s best efforts, she never fully understood this building and its genius design. It is beyond an extension of Alaya’s will, it is him; his paradigm made flesh from floor to ceiling and every speck of space. Entering the wall like water meeting water, he disappears.

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