The Stargazer's War - Chapter 2.10

Chapter 2.10: It Doesn’t Go Away

It was technically morning by the time my work began in earnest. The faintest glimmer of predawn light yet to breach the canopy as I sat crosslegged in Lucy’s clearing. The gloom proved little help.

I didn’t waste time, preferring to launch directly into what had once been my evening routine with a renewed vigor born of urgency. I was ready for the blinding cacophony that greeted the opening of my spiritual sense, prepared for it, by now, if not used to it. Never used to it.

I made straight for the sky, wincing as a migraine bloomed behind my eyes. That, I could ignore. I’d had more than enough practice.

Higher and higher I reached, steadying my resolve with the recurring promise of just one more, that this next push might get me there. I made it an hour before I stopped believing that. I made it two before I gave up on saying it entirely.

The suns took to the skies as is their wont, their angry crimson glow little more than background detail, a dull red against my closed eyelids. Even as the morning ebbed and they took their place overhead, directly beyond the reprieve towards which I so reached, I cared little for their presence. Theirs wasn’t the light that burned.

Five hours into my efforts, my very soul raw and ragged from the abuse, my eyes flicked open. I noticed only then the sweat dripping down my brow, coating my neck, soaking my shirt. To my left a sandwich had appeared, wrapped in foil and set upon a plate as if I’d come out for a picnic. A bottle of water and a thermos of tea sat beside it.

“Lucy, you’re an angel,” I called to the open hatch as I reached for the offered lunch. I made it halfway through the sandwich—roast beef and peppers on dutch crunch—and all the way through the water before my stomach called halt. The tea helped calm its tumults.

Normally, this would be the point where Charlotte discovered some serum or Lucy conjured from the depths of her cargo bay some miracle pill meant to extend the spiritual senses. I’d foregone such chemical aids thus far—for lack of both access and any understanding how they’d interact with my qi—but I’d long passed the point of turning down opportunities. Threads, I would’ve popped pills by the handful if we had anything that’d do the trick.

Instead I turned to good old reliable caffeine and kept pushing.

I had no measure of my progress by the time I finally stood and left the clearing under the colorful hues of the setting suns. I stretched stiff limbs and shook aching joints from a day spent sitting as I returned to Lucy’s soulspace to share a quiet dinner with Charlotte and attend to Nick’s tree and the void beast egg alike. I spent the evening moving, sparring against a faceless holo alone in the gym, my usual opponent absent as he toiled away incorporating the ebbstrix feather into his axe.

By the time I made it to bed, the trifecta of mental, physical, and spiritual exhaustion pulled me under, a brief yet wondrous respite from tolls of existence. It lasted for five ours, one of my better nights, before the world once again imposed itself upon me.

And so the days went.

If I’d been living the past months in a fugue, that terrible half-life of sleep deprivation and spiritual strain, these latter days felt closer to a personal hell. Instead of passing in a daze, the hours seemed to stretch, the minutes longer than they had any right to be as I reached ever higher, grasping for the heavens as if in some sick metaphor for cultivation itself.

There was probably meaning to be found there, some sense of poetic beauty in the way I desperately fled the power the rest of the universe fought and died for. I didn’t search for it. My work, in that week that lasted a lifetime, was no divine struggle nor ponderous reflection on my place in the world. I sought no revelation nor insight in my efforts, no meaning in all I endured.

Sometimes suffering is just suffering.

Still I pushed, still I reached, for I’d found a kindred spirit in this hellscape of life and I refused to let my failings prove its end.

I was five days into my work when Xavier emerged from his own, not yet bronze but finished with the physical part of his advancement and ready to embark upon the spiritual one. It was there, sitting around the breakfast table, with a mouth half full of hash browns, that he upended my entire perspective.

“I was wondering,” he said, pausing to swallow between words, “why is it your senses go all massive-scale when you touch the infinite sea, but never when you don’t?”

My fork froze halfway to my open mouth. “I… don’t know.” Sure, I could wax poetic about the infinite sea sweeping me away in its endless tides, reify exposure to its vastness as some essential force wrenching my mind into the large-scale.

But that wouldn’t answer the question.

Xavier shrugged. “Seems weird is all. The infinite sea doesn’t act, right? It just is.”

“And it doesn’t go away,” I muttered, more to myself than to him. Abruptly I pushed myself to my feet, letting my fork fall into my uneaten breakfast. “I have to go.”

I didn’t bother going outside. If Xavier was right—and I’d rarely known him to be wrong—a few walls or the distraction of Lucy’s core wouldn’t make a lick of difference. At least the cultivation room had padded flooring.

I focused inward, at first, running through my thoughts at a breakneck pace as the paradigm of my struggle shifted.

I’d been caught, trapped in the small scale. Because everything I knew about dark qi and void-induced psychosis told me the infinite sea was only accessible out in space, I’d taken it to be a matter of reach, of getting past all the light qi in the atmosphere to touch the dark qi beyond it.

I’d been down here fighting to extend my reach, pushing my senses upward at the mortal scale because I’d assumed it was a matter of distance, but that was backwards.

To a human, the distance between me and the vacuum of space stretched far beyond my spiritual reach. To the infinite sea, an inconsequential speck of dust fruitlessly struggled to look past a slightly larger inconsequential speck of dust.

Well over a year ago now, I’d looked out the window of RF-31 and come to the conclusion that in the grand scheme of things, I was nothing. My fears, my wants, my very existence didn’t matter. How silly I’d been to believe that just because it was bigger, more powerful, more significant in comparison to my own smallness that Ilirian of all things did.

I stood upon a rock only trivially larger than Fyrion or roofie or Lucy herself, and somehow tricked myself into thinking I had to overcome Ilirian for the infinite sea to make its way here, but it already was here. What difference could a few feet, a few miles, a few lightyears possibly make?

Just because I didn’t see it, didn’t mean it wasn’t there, didn’t make it any smaller or me any larger. Just because I’d distracted myself with beast hunts and training and Arcadian Gardeners didn’t mean it went away. That I sat surrounded by light didn’t lessen the dark.

My gaze still inward, I thought of the night, of the stars and the nothing between them. I thought of the raft of light and life on which I drifted. I thought of eternity, the endless march asserting the unquestionable truth that even the brightest fires will one day die.

I opened my mind’s eye, and while the noise and the heat and the pain yet lingered, it made up such a tiny shard of reality that it may as well have ceased entirely. It didn’t diminish so much as drown in the cold ocean in which it and its neighbors and the stars they orbited pretended at significance.

While Ilirian and the Dueling Stars and the Black Maw and Ascension’s End itself all desperately defied their own smallness or sought to ignore it entirely, I dove headfirst into those uncaring waters.

And I drank my fill.

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