Music for today:
Rok Nardin - Transcendence
https://youtu.be/syRFCPqR3tc
Chapter 461: Delphi
??? - ??? : Year ??? : ???
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What is time?
Is it a dimension..? A direction..? A motion..?
As I drifted through memories, I questioned it more than anything else. In one moment, visions of traveling through worlds came to me.. in the next, recollections of home. As though my memories had slipped their sequence, conversations, sights, and sensations returned as ripples in a pond—surges of recollection that, despite stretching into eternities, somehow felt fleeting.
I knew everything that played out, able to recount every word, every thought, every action that passed in those moments.
But somehow, I could only ever know them as they happened.
Like déjà vu had sharpened into a chisel. My mind insisted I had experienced it all long ago, yet the moment I searched for what was to come next.. it eluded me.
For the first time in countless eons.. the winds of time shifted to show me who I truly was.. recounting every memory exactly as it happened.. and resequencing my soul to correct the image my mind painted of itself.
The reminder of every stray thought that nudged our path through the cosmos.. and every sin that made me who I was, chiseled at my mind...
At first, I rejected it.. sinking into insanity as my mind was corrected by my soul...
But eventually.. I stopped fighting it...
The longer I recounted my path through worlds, the more I noticed and appreciated the smaller things.. the more gentle shifts that changed who I was.. who I used to be.
All until.. the image of identity returned to my mind.
I was an explorer.. a researcher.. and a brother...
However, the moment those memories ordered themselves.. the winds of recollection hit a wall...
A chasm so deep the winds couldn't reach the other side...
Time has always left its scars.. memories that had been reduced to blurs in the stretches between worlds.. or breaks from the void...
But nothing.. nothing was like that one...
The moment we reached the edge of our home galaxy, we floated in empty space to look around and search for another solar system to travel to, discussing what we found while weighing our options.
In that moment, neither of us thought much of it.. looking out into the blanket of stars, we had found a galaxy—orange as opposed to white—floating close enough for us to see its spiral with our naked eyes.
It was far.. but neither of us bothered calculating it...
And so.. Dagr spoke poison into my ear... "Perhaps that's where we'll find home..."
It was hope.. a glimmer of possibility that stood strong against the odds we came to know.. to oppose the picture the sea of lifeless rocks behind us painted...
And so.. I made the call... After a conversation that passed in a blur.. I made the decision that my old self would have regretted...
We crossed galaxies...
...
In the void, time doesn't have a uniform march... Resisted by the flowing of space mana that filled every little nook, presences were so restricted that my aura, capable of stretching tens, if not hundreds of thousands of kilometers in the vacuum of space was restricted to a few hundred.
It was suffocating.. and it should have been my warning sign...
In the void, my time, and Dagr's time flowed differently.. with every minute he experienced, months passed for me.
And in the silence, a canyon was carved through my soul.
Left to the machinations of my own mind, endless years of silence eroded the proud identity I had created. In order to keep from going insane, I spent every waking second thinking, analyzing the behaviors of the space mana filling the void or the flow of mana through my own body.
But after fifty thousand years.. there's only so much to study.. so I began dissecting the rainforest of memories in my soul.. taking conversations with Dagr, and breaking down every little detail to fill idle time analyzing...
But it only made the madness carve deeper.
Exiting the void to try and catch my breath, gasping for something to fill my mind, I was only met with confusion from a younger Dagr.
We had never stopped between worlds before.. nothing was far enough away for me to succumb to insanity before we reached our destination.. and this time, despite my fifty millennia of travel through the void, we had barely begun our trek.
"Why did you exit the void so soon?" Looking out at the stars, Dagr had his eyes on our destination instantly.. and while he knew we had been in the void countless times longer than previous trips, the galaxy hardly looked any bigger than when we started our journey.
-Fifty.. millennia...- Seeing just how little progress we made for myself.. I felt part of my soul wither...
The me that had formed under the guidance of Mother.. through the travels with brother.. and across the milky galaxy once holding our home.. wasnt going to survive the trip...
And I knew it...
But it was too late to turn back. Being so far into the abysmal nothingness, there wasn't a single star close enough to descern.. if we turned around, it'd be another fifty thousand years before we reached the a single lifeless rock, and there, I'd only be barrated by Dagr.
So.. I pushed on...
Clinging to Dagr's microscopic movements, I did everything I could to stay strong.. to hold onto my sense of self.. and my relationship with Dagr...
But with every pause for breath the chasm between us widened.. good memories faded.. and sense of who I was crumbled from a rainforest.. to mere memories of it.
I buried everything... Hoping I could protect it from the erosion of time, desert sands swept over the rainforest that once flourished in my soul, and somehow it seemed to work...
Over the remaining hundreds of thousands of years, my mind seemed to keep hold. I dedicated all my time to studying mana, biology, and the soul, finally beginning to dabble in chemistry and science as well.
I stayed strong.
When we finally reached a world on the other side of the expanse, I was proud.
'I had held on...' I thought...
But after hopping just a few more worlds, that delusion was shattered.
"...you've changed..." Dagr's words blew away the sands that covered my soul in a blink, uncovering not the rainforest I somehow believed still lived underneath, but instead a sea of fossils and rocks standing as echoes of a time long past...
That.. was the moment the string snapped...
By the time I noticed, I hardly had memory of the times before the crossing.. just memory of the shape it should have had...
Explorer.. researcher.. brother...
But no matter how much I tried to dig.. I couldn't escape the chasm that I had sunk into...
So.. with an empty slate.. I left behind the rotted image of myself...
From that moment forth, I planted a new forest at the bottom of the scar. I began to look at creation with curiosity, and destruction with fascination. I wanted to see how things formed, how they split.. how they began, and how they ended...
My mind was overtaken by a completely insatiable curiosity, and the once boring, lifeless rocks we visited, became subjects of not just my attention, but experimentation.
And that was when Dagr and I began splitting...
Despite our travels together, my mind, aged hundreds of millennia beyond his, took the shape of a creator, finding fascination in the gods we met—their worlds filled with colors, orders, and dreams.
But he couldn't stand them... To him, they were thieves wearing crowns that didn't belong to them. Parasites feeding on belief, not recognizing the worth of what they had...
To me, they were puzzles. To him, they were abominations.
But we stuck together...
With time, I became the balance to his chaos, growing my strength and expanding my knowledge while bouncing through worlds owned by the endlessly fascinating god known as 'The System'.
But while I had stopped searching for a new home, Dagr never settled. Unable to deal with the incessant probing of The System, we continued our search through that new galaxy to find a world beyond its eyes.. exploring and learning about just what was out there as we passed.
But the deeper we searched, the more Dagr's unrest festered.
World after world he spit venom at what he saw—calling the people parasites, mocking their faith, ridiculing their gods. To him, every world was another disappointment, another example of existence wasted.
I wanted to know how things worked. He wanted to know why they deserved to exist at all.
And so, the cracks spread.
Every star we crossed, every void we braved, our words sharpened.
At first, I thought it was just his youth—his years still too short, his soul untested by silence. But as decades turned to centuries, then into millennia, I realized it wasn't immaturity.
It was his nature.
Dagr's soul had always burned hotter than mine, but while I thought time would temper it, the fire only grew.
World after world I took time to learn, finding fascinating minds to gift weapons, knowledge, or materials sometimes from my own flesh on a whim to see where the winds would take them...
But every time, the worlds ended up flattened by Dagr's paw...
We had grown strong.. so much so nothing could touch us even in worlds where sentience had ceased, and monsters the size of mountains roamed... I was the only one who could stop him, yet I never did.
In destruction birthed creation, as if waiting for it, the moment planets were cleansed, The System that watched over it ceased its idle, and moved its hand to clean the slate and start anew...
With time, it became a mentor to me as it became a nemesis to Dagr.
But that was when we found it.. a solar system beyond those prying eyes…
At the center of a small void in the galaxy, there was a world surrounded by entities capable of swallowing worlds.. a world untouched by artificial guidance...
Home…
Delphi.
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