Chapter 33: The Trial Of Dark And Light

  Erik was right back in his mindplace, the magical sphere that each trial filled with new wonders, symbolising his magic and his powers. Like last time he underwent a trial during absorption, the spirits he had already absorbed were nowhere to be seen. Erik didn’t know if they did that willingly or not, or if they could actually help him if he needed it.

  Cross Vigor, his innate ability, had tried helping him during the first time, but she wasn’t quite the same as an absorbed spirit, Erik figured. Based on what he knew, spirits lived in a whole other realm, and when absorbed by Remnants, lost connection to that realm.

  How they were connected to one realm when living in the human world as crystals and the like, he couldn’t even begin to understand, and he wasn’t sure the spirits knew, either. The few questions Erik had asked Leviathan and Sovereign were answered with ‘because that’s the way it is’, which didn’t help as much as they might think it did.

  Erik stood on the island made from Leviathan’s trial, looking around for any recent changes. He realised he had named none of the landmarks, but he didn’t see the need to. Leviathan Island and Sovereign Cliff was enough if the need to specify a location ever arose. They were also the only two landmarks around…

  Seeing nothing out of place, he vanished from the island and appeared atop the cliff next to the waterfall. He turned to look behind the cliff, but saw nothing special. Would there not be a trial, this time? He called to Sovereign, but didn’t get any reply, nor did Leviathan answer. Guessing it was futile, he still tried to get Cross Vigor to respond. He was not surprised when he was ignored.

  Figuring he was limiting himself to his imaginary body’s senses, he next tried to sense anything out of the ordinary in or around his sphere. This was something quite unnatural for him, and he almost forgot he could do it between the times he tried it. He did sense something this time, but couldn’t put his finger on what.

  It was outside the sphere, like every trial up until now, but it couldn’t be seen in the black void. It was dark. The feeling he got from the thing he sensed was quite different from the void, but visually identical.

  It was another sphere, roughly a quarter of the size of his own. He moved his senses closer, enveloping the dark sphere. It vanished in a blink, and Erik couldn’t sense it anymore.

  He once more tried finding it, spreading his senses all over the void. It took him a few more minutes, but he found it once more. It was unmoving, floating there in the pitch black, completely camouflaged.

  Erik tried surrounding it once more, this time more gently. His will was like a hand, softly touching the black sphere. It vanished again. Erik—annoyed at this—was wondering what he was missing. Every time he was close to it, he got this feeling about something. It was like the moment before realising something. He only needed to keep hold of it a short while more. He was close to getting insight, he felt.

  Erik soon found the sphere a third time and managed to keep his greed in check. While keeping a part of his senses on the black orb, he felt around for other clues, hoping to find the missing piece of information he needed. It didn’t take him long at all.

  Behind the black sphere was another, brighter sphere. It had been visually hidden behind the black orb that melded into the empty void effortlessly. It was all Erik needed to see before something clicked in his mind. He hadn’t considered it earlier, but it was now right in front of him; the two new spheres were light and dark.

  Earlier, he’d considered the void, the black emptiness outside his own sphere, as dark, or black. It wasn’t. It was nothing. He’d done the same to his own sphere. Because he could see the water, see the island, he figured it was lit, though there weren’t any sources of light.

  His omnipotent senses had fooled him into thinking he could see in his mindplace. He reached for both spheres, realising what the trial was. He got hold of the black one, but both vanished a mere moment later.

  “Shit. How do I get them if they keep disappearing?” Erik said to himself, spreading his senses out wide once more.

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  “What’s happening back there?”

  The medic seated in front with Amir asked, hearing only the gasps and wow’s from his partner.

  “He’s observing magic for the first time,” Emma explained over the radio.

  “I want to see!” he yelled in response.

  “It isn’t anything exciting right now, they’re just glowing a bit,” she responded.

  “Glowing?”

  “They’re glowing red… pushing gemstones into their chests,” the second medic responded.

  “Glowing red?” asked the first.

  “Yes, Peter, glowing red from their chests!”

  “One of them’s a girl, right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How much are you seeing?”

  “Dammit Peter, stop thinking with your tiny! You’re a happily married man and she’s half your age!”

  “Well, I just call it ‘married’…” Peter mumbled over the radio.

  Sophie looked at the state of her sister beside her. Jessie had never been awkward showing her body off. Was it because she had no interest in men, or was it because she considered women beautiful, and why conceal beauty? It was funny to think about when Jessie wore so many hoodies that revealed absolutely nothing, but she also loved comfortable clothes.

  Sophie wasn’t quite there. She had no problem showing off her body in private company with her friends or boyfriends, but in public? Not even on the beach. She looked at her sister’s uncovered chest.

  With her Crest, almost identical to a tattoo, her dark hair and ripped jeans, she looked a bit like a wild girl right now, especially with her chest out like it was. She still wore a bra, but it wasn’t very modest. Sophie knew the rest of the girls didn’t mind, and Erik had seen it all several times already as far as she knew.

  Sophie was glad the medic beside them wasn’t the one up front, though. She hadn’t caught his name, but the one called Peter seemed a bit of a perv.

  “Potato chips?” Emma asked, holding a bag of snacks in front of Sophie. Sophie smiled in response and reached her hand in, growing more and more confused until she took her hand out.

  “These are crisps,” she said. Emma wasn’t sure she meant it as a question. She realised her mistake moments later.

  “Oh, sorry! The rest of the world calls it chips! My bad!” Emma apologised.

  “Oh, no, don’t apologise! I didn’t realise you weren’t from here, though!” Sophie squealed.

  “Really? Maybe it hasn’t come up. I’m from the Empire.”

  Erik woke some time later, hearing the voices of Angela, Emma, and Sophie over the radio, chatting merrily amongst themselves. He smiled when he heard that the topic of the conversation was the difference between Norway and Sweden.

  Emma, being the resident expert on the subject when Erik wasn’t around, struggled to make the others realise that they were two different countries, but within the same empire. It didn’t help when her history lesson on the matter said the two countries were once one. That was more than a hundred years earlier, though, and they’d been under the same empire for seventy years now.

  When Emma said the phrase ‘just like United Britain’, the brits’ lids blew off, claiming it ‘definitely wasn’t the same’. The discussion escalated to a friendly argument from there, and it was such a heated argument that Erik managed to pick another crystal from his bag without any of the girls noticing he was awake.

  All the remaining ones in his bag were equally powerful to him, just not as powerful as the previous ones. As his Crest and all the slots were uniform, he didn’t feel like which gem mattered as much. The medic across from him noticed but nodded in silence at him and nothing more. Erik hurried back to his meditative mindplace to absorb his third and last major power.

  It had taken him quite a while to figure out the previous trial, though in hindsight, it shouldn’t have. All he had to do was gently lead the two orbs at the same time. It took him a while even after that as the two orbs seemed to resist him. They each struggled in varying degrees, and if he lost control of one of them, they both vanished and reset somewhere else.

  Once he managed to get them close to his sphere, he also had to set their speed and trajectory gently around his sphere, like two moons orbiting his planet. The irony of this was that these two spheres were more like suns, and the dark orb cast darkness on his world, something Erik didn’t think was physically possible. Magically possible, on the other hand…

  He’d settled on keeping the dark sphere unmoving at the apex of his own mindplace’s edge while the bright sun was drooped lower and orbited around Erik’s sphere. These positions meant that it would never be night in his mindscape. It would be a permanent afternoon, but the shadows—an entirely new thing in his space—would rotate as if the day was passing, depending on where the sun was positioned.

  Since only the top half of his sphere was surface, and the bottom half was filled with magic sea, there was no reason for the two suns to rotate around the whole globe. He had no reason to light up the sea beneath him, after all. He quite liked the aesthetic as well.

  His next trial was starting, and he felt his mind already tiring from earlier. He had already figured out that the tiredness he was feeling wasn’t just from the strain and stress these trials demanded, but also from the physical absorption of the crystals.

  Even if the trial had been effortless, he’d still just be able to take two or three in brief intervals. His energy, or his magical power, was now being spent by every action he did. Things like his physical stamina couldn’t be compared to that of a normal human. His physical endurance and his mental capacity were now joined in a single pool: energy.

  Erik didn’t know the science behind it, but technically, he could do so much maths that he physically couldn’t lift a finger anymore. This was, of course, an absurd example, and he’d regenerate more energy every minute—much more so than he’d spend—but it was still technically possible.