Reality once more...

Time passed, and nothing really that eventful happened. Which was fine with me.

The Wards of the Hags failed one by one. The choking, stinking fog and mist evaporated, and cool mountain winds began to blow through the valley. The waterfall illusion over the entry vanished. The residual protective effects on the Shrine began to fade, and I made a point of rupturing all of them with prejudice, and cleaning out that Bone Golem while I was at it.

After being cleansed by vivic fire, the Shrine was actually the most suitable of the places for me to set up, having multiple rooms for storage and a cleaner atmosphere. There were some valuables tucked away in the place which I dug out with my Tremblesense and Tremble’s eager sniffing for Precious Things™, and so I set up shop there.

It took me quite a while to transfer all the useful stuff from the Hags’ hovels to the Shrine, but I had nothing better to do with my downtime. This was all about getting ready for the future.

I worked on my Girdle in my downtime, refined Tremble more, adjusted my tools, and began the work on my Floating Forge.

To make an adamant Weapon, naturally I had to be able to melt it. Earth-Energized Tungsten is not something that melts easily, and I didn’t have a supply of acetylene gas or a massive supply of electricity to get that temperature. Lava was a laugh. Trying to melt adamant with lava was like trying to melt an ice cube with liquid oxygen. Lava was maybe 2,000C at best, adamant needed to be at least twice that hot.

Magic and dragonflame were my choices to work with, and without an ancient fire dragon handy…

I was missing the Hell puppies right now. Could have used some pyric power comps for my work.

Tremble was sleeping, stuck in the outlet from the stream coming off the mountain, in vivic mode. Unwhite energies sparkled through the waters, washed into the swamp, and began to slowly and continuously burn it away, until I could transform the skull of the rusalka into another vivic fountain to relieve him of the duty.

The power he needed flowed out from me as long as I had Essence invested in him, which I did all the time. Day by day, he was getting stronger, even without me feeding him Naming Karma… which he still got as I wandered around the swamp and the walls searching for buried loot with him, and destroying the necroic loci that had formed the Ward foundations for the Hags.

Just like me, a little bit stronger every day.

I made Potions from the stuff I salvaged from the Hags, and the last batches of nasty stuff that would ever be harvested from this swamp.

Their Henge was a bit of a tougher nut to crack, and I didn’t have the wherewithal to disassemble it quite yet. I did inform the Elementals about my intentions, and they were simply patient and waiting to be dismissed, rather timelessly unconcerned about it all.

So, yeah, there was plenty of work to keep us occupied. It was kinda startling with all the nooks and crannies that stuff was hidden in, especially when I went up to the nests of the blood ravens after disposing of the damn birds. Bloody thieves, they were…

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Renewal passed. Unlike in Dream, it was much more tangible to me than before.

Sylune was high in the night sky, the Silver Queen, Patron of Silver Magic, of navigation, and mysteries yet to be found… and the searing-starfire holy Wrath from Above opponent of everything Hags represented.

Most Hagchildren came about via the Ritual of the Silver Queen, where a night-long ceremony of gentle moonlight and falling stars became a howling, burning bitchfest of Curse and Goddess going at one another over the body and soul of the Hagchild. That Ritual ended when the sun rose, and Aru’s golden light swept the last of the Curse away… or the Hagchild gave in to the Curse and became a Hag, and had to be put down.

My way of doing things was rather against the grain. Certainly, a true infant child would not have been able to overcome Nightmare, and simply should have been erased and subsumed by the Curse.

I felt the cresting wave of silver magic moving through the world, and my soul cycling over with it in Renewal, buoyed by the wave of power it brought with it. Invested Essence relaxed and drained away, save for those I held tight and kept in place, like with Tremble.

It nudged free some of the Karma I’d ripped off the Curse, and flowed through my body. Remembered ability refined into actual physical ability and muscle memory, and paraevolutionary changes rippled through a body that was learning to exist on a Diamond Vajra, guided along by yours truly.

My Second Heart was coming along well. The Alchemical changes I’d been driving along were slowly taking effect, although not just biologically.

Having a Diamond Vajra gave me access to copious amounts of energy at all times. A soul didn’t build up lactic acids, after all. Not making use of that energy seemed like a complete waste of time and space. It was basically already supplying all of my caloric needs, regardless of how much work I did. I only needed to eat to grow up and replace lost cells. I just added onto the load, and my soul and ki went along with it without trouble.

Diamond Vajra. Hard, hard soul. Lots of power there.

Biological processes were doing less of the grunt work, and more of the refinement work now. My soul was infusing my entire body, which basically bypassed my nervous system, for example. This allowed me to modify my nerves to finer and finer levels, giving ever-increasing levels of control. It also meant soemthing could shatter my back and I could still move normally, since nerves weren’t necessary to transmit information, they only helped coordinate it.

My blood was also being circulated continuously by my Vajra, instead of by heartbeats. Oh, it was still there as a backup and juicer, but my heart was more of a confluence of major veins and arteries, like a highway intersection, rather than something absolutely essential, now. More oxygen exchange was taking place around the lungs than in the aorta, and the beat of my heart was very slow and relaxed.

My second heart was basically forming between the blood vessels going to my lower body, increasing circulation there, becoming the place where building block materials were whisked into and out of the bloodstream to and from the rest of the body. It didn’t beat, purely there for exchange of oxygen and stuff, although my Vajra centered on it as a point of energy transfer.

In short, if a doctor were to go looking for my heartbeat, they’d think I was almost dead and wonder how I was even walking around.

Most of my autonomic functions had moved out of my brain and were dispersed in redundant nodes throughout my body. I had key memory backups inside my bones, and stretching out into the akasha, with cross-linked cells and alternate pathing.

While I had human genetics, someone looking at my insides would have thought I was an alien.

I exhaled long and low as I completed my meditation-cum-period of evolutionary advancement.

Tremble was up on a pole, standing guard with a broader field of view. That view was very depressing, but the fact was there wasn’t a lot of cover without the mist, and with a decent amount of height, my Sword could see the whole valley.

“Sama?” Tremble asked, slowly pulling out of the pole and floating down to me.

I blinked, smiled at the first words, and then frowned.

“Tremble?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow, as the Sword floated down next to me.

“Sama, I…” the Sword trailed off.

My Sword didn’t sound like a him. I just looked at it for a long moment.

“Are you her?” I asked finally, swiping at the mess that was half of my face.

“I think so?” she replied, sounding somewhat relieved at the dry lack of hostility in my voice. My Soul was driving her existence, so it wasn’t like I could hide much in the way of my emotions from her, and so I didn’t bother.

“Mmmm. Well, that’s a Good Thing. You seemed like a pretty nice person, all things considered. Tremble was basically made out of energies stolen from the Curse, and a portion of my Soul… just like you. It would only make sense that you would have harmony with it, and when the Curse failed, you would go there.” I took another deep breath. “How much do you remember?”

“I remember everything from Nightmare. My life… the details from Nightmare seem like an awful mirror that I don’t recall the exact details of…”

“Do you recall your name?”

“No…” she answered, a little sadly. “But given who I was, was a construct of the Curse, I don’t really want to…” Floating there, she shifted slightly. “You know you don’t look like I did?” she abruptly spoke up.

“That surprises you?” I asked archly.

She somewhat taken aback at how blasé I was. “Well, yes…”

“I don’t look like you remember, because you looked like I was supposed to. I… look like you were supposed to.” I could almost feel her blink. “Remember, the Curse ate me and turned itself to look like me. If there were no Curse of the Hag, what do you suppose you would have looked like?” I poked at the right side of my face. “The same as any person, the product of the woman Hagmom was born as, and whoever our father was, complete with your own soul. And as you know, shapeshifters largely revert to their original forms once they die, for all intents and purposes…”

“I… so you took my body, even as I took yours?”

“You didn’t have a soul. As soon as my soul was taken, this body became mine. The Curse is just a veil over the soul beneath. It would have taken your identity from you as surely as it stole my soul, because this body was born without a soul. Fuck the Curse.” I held out my fist.

She swung a quillon to meet it. “Fuck the Curse!” she said with surprising venom. “It-it took everything…”

“Yes. That’s what it does. That is what Evil does, and The Curse of the Hag is one of the greatest Evils to assail the human race that exists. It transcends worlds, dimensions, and Divine Realms of authority. Virtually any place that has magic suffers the Curse, like little ink spots upon a map of Creation, seeds of corruption and darkness that grow without need of the Divine or the Damned to exert themselves. The Hags guide people into Darkness, and Evil prospers.”

“And we haven’t even found Hagmom yet,” she hissed. “I want to kill her so bad…”

“I’d say get in line, but you’re probably going to be first,” I drawled back, and she hummed in happy anger, planning her revenge. “In the meantime, we can get satisfaction in undoing something they did, returning purity to the land, and burning away the corruption they sowed over so long.”

“That sounds both soooo boring, and satisfying anyways.”

“It’s fine. I still need to grow up. We’ve many long years ahead of us.”

She waggled in the air. “You say that with some meaning behind it…”

I waggled my black nails, and grinned to show the double canines, licking them for emphasis. “Hags don’t have a maximum age.”

“Maximum age?” She thought that over. “Wait, so you won’t really grow old?”

“Correct. I may get more and more wrinkled from the trials and tribulations, but physically, I’ll never really get old, I’ll just keep getting closer and closer to middle-aged.” I reached out and tinged her. “Just like all you have to fear is wear, tear, and rust.”

“Wow.” She spun around slowly. “I-I hadn’t thought about that…”

“Aye. So when I say we have time, we have time. Now, others may not have time, but that’s a different story.” I gazed up at the descending arc of the silver moon overhead. “Know the Salute to the Silver Queen?”

She was caught off-guard. “I think I’ve heard it, but I can’t remember the words…”

“How about I teach you? After all, She can hear you, and if she can hear you, she can hear me if I sing with you…”

“Ohhh… yes, please!” she said eagerly.

It wasn’t long before a clear duet rang out over the inky waters, which seemed to roil a bit and draw back at the sound of a blessed tribute to the Silver Queen rising in a place once devoted to her opposite number. Tremble’s singing voice was crystalline, with a stereo effect that Sylune had likely never heard from this world, and our combined modifier would be about +30 or so… or better music than the vast majority of beings would ever have heard in their life, even in a magical land.

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We would Sing the Salute to the Silver Queen as midnight came. We would Sing the Salute to Aru as the morning came, the Salute to Mithar as the sun rose to its high, and the Salute to Aethra as the sun hit the western horizon and the evening breezes rose up.

In between, it was anything we could come up with, as appropriate for the situation. Tremble never got tired of singing, and picked up new tunes at the drop of a hat, too. She was very good with visual and audio effects to go along with things, especially with our song. Although she couldn’t replicate a profound instrument’s play, helping the songs along wasn’t a problem at all.

Naturally I had no instruments unless I chose to make one, and given that I could sing for a couple months without repeating a song, and developing my lungs and breath control was a thing I didn’t mind working with, trying to assemble a proper fiddle was pretty low on my list of priorities.

Summer passed by and the cool of autumn and multicolored leaves blown in from different places on the mountain, slowly arrived.