“But making a shroud is one thing. Making a shroud that an unshrouded can use is another entirely.” the founder continued. “And I’m not settling for just any shroud. I wanted one made to my specifications, one superior to other shrouds. So I set about studying.”

“The shrouded Ethermen.” Caeden nodded. At least that made sense now. “You started on them, rather than using the technology to enhance unshrouded. That’s why they’re so much less refined.”

“Indeed, I ran many tests to see how the integration of ether into flesh would affect a shrouded. After all, the superior physicality of a shrouded should be able to withstand a level of modification that my body cannot. It was after seeing such stunning results that I realized the truth. That was when I started making Ethermen. I should have realized sooner that the ethertech barely keeping me alive would enhance any normal, healthy unshrouded.”

“Those experiments also heightened my understanding of the soul. There’s a surprising amount of interaction between the body and soul. I found that proper manipulation of one could affect the other. Another realization that should have been obvious, considering my current state. After all, my body was never touched by anything other than the Outsider’s soul. So of course a soul can affect a body. And if that is true, then the reverse must also be.” The founder moved over toward the CV screens even as he kept talking. At this point, it seems he’d forgotten about the Entrance Blade entirely.

“What I don’t get is why you attacked the CA. If your intent was to create a shroud, why draw the attention of an antagonistic government? I get why you made the Revolution, you needed people to draw from for your experiments, right? But why get the CA involved? Or attack the Tournament of Powers.” Caeden asked. Those events aligned with his false motivations, not the one he’d stated now. How did those attacks help him make a shroud?

“Ah, yes.” The founder nodded. “I suppose that wouldn’t make sense. Allow me to enlighten you. Simply put, I discovered that creating a shroud from scratch was nigh-on impossible. It would be akin to creating a soul from scratch, which I also cannot do.”

“Thus my experiments drifted more and more into the manipulation of the soul and shrouds. If I could not make a shroud, I would find a way to change one to my liking. You and your friend are the results of those experiments, though incidentally. You are the fruit of my attempts to split one shroud into two, creating an artificial dual-shrouded. And your friend there was an attempt to do the reverse. Fusing the two shrouds of a naturally dual-shrouded into a single, more powerful, shroud.”

The founder laughed. “It’s interesting, seeing the results so many years later. The negative consequences of your experiments were recorded. You-” He pointed at Caeden. “-resulted in a shroud of vastly diminished quality, along with indefinite fragments remaining in the soul after the procedure that failed to form a second shroud.”

“And you-” He point to Erik. “-were an even bigger mess. The resulting shroud was in conflict with itself, and constantly threw off some sort of causal radiation that was a chaotic mess to deal with. But it’s so interesting how everything ended up resolving itself. Looking at the two of you, I really should have followed up on more of these experiments to see how the actions of a living soul could affect the initial results.”

“You’re both marvelous examples of what a soul can accomplish, despite an unfortunate starting circumstance. After all, it looks like you managed to consolidate those leftover fragments into a proper second shroud, and a throne no less. And then you used your throne to evolve that shroud? That’s impressive.”

Caeden was growing more and more wary of letting this continue. It seemed that the founder’s insight into souls far outstriped their expectations if he could tell that much about Caeden’s shrouds.

“And you!” The founder whipped around to look at Erik. “The causal waves are still present, but your shroud has diverged through an evolution into much more powerful versions of the originals. I wonder…” He turned back to his screens, muttering to himself.

“Wait, how the heck did you do experiments on me? My parents never would have given me to the Revolution!” Erik’s expression darkened. “And you’re saying you’re responsible for my bad luck?”

“Is that how you think of it? I suppose bad luck isn’t that far from the truth of the matter. As for your origins, isn’t it obvious? You were adopted. I can hardly be blamed for your parents not mentioning it to you.”

“You’re the reason I’ve had to live with this my whole life!” Erik growled. Black chains began to form around his body, seemingly unbidden.

“Hah! I was right!” The founder looked at Erik again, and Caeden felt a growing dread in his heart. Before he could reach for Blade Forge, the founder kept speaking. “Oh, don’t be such a whiner. I’ll be relieving you of that pain anyhow. Isn’t that magnanimous of me?”

He flicked his finger, and Erik slumped like a puppet that had its strings cut. Cat yelped in surprise next to him, melting her restraints with a burst of Necromantic energy and rushing to his side. Her hands started waving, strands of grey soulstuff forming between her fingers.

“Oh, a shroud that can directly manipulate souls! I should have thought of that, it would have made this next part much simpler.” The founder laughed.

“What did you do?” Caeden growled, severing everyone's bindings with daggers from the Forge. He was beyond caring about whatever this man had done in the past. “Tell me and I might not kill you.”

“Hah! That’s rich. But it’s not your question,” Then the founder shrugged. “I supposed it doesn’t matter, and it’s honestly an extension of the answer to your previous question. See, I needed those attacks for one reason. Raw materials. I found a lovely material, an ether that only forms in the depths of the Starry Sea, and reverse-engineered some of its properties.”

The sword. Caeden thought. He’s referring to the suppression fields.

“See, it directly affected souls. It would widen gaps in souls when they were present. And shrouds form gaps in souls that this ether would attack, destroying the soul if it was in a large enough concentration. Normal humans don’t have those gaps, so it doesn’t affect them. But I used that ether as a basis to create a machine that could pull in the souls of those that died within a certain radius. A side-effect of that ability was the suppression of shrouds within that affect radius. The soul extending beyond the body to use aura could not withstand the pull, so it retreats within the body instinctively.”

“I ordered those attacks to harvest large quantities of shrouds. Of course, the first set of attacks was merely to allow the second to happen, cause a political upheaval strong enough to cause a call for a Tournament of Power. There, I could gather together the strongest shrouded of the era to be harvested. You all nearly interfered in that. Your actions meant that I nearly didn’t gather enough raw materials to finish my shroud, but those shrouded followed after you and I managed to end enough to gather the requisite total.”

Cat continued to frantically work to fix whatever the founder had done to Erik. Caeden assumed it was soul-related, considering her actions. He wanted to attack the founder immediately, but if his explanation could help Cat save Erik even a little, he wouldn’t risk it. And the man seemed to know that, reveling in his stalling speech as he walked slowly through the events leading up to now.

“Of course, I got back here, only to find that something was still missing. The soup of souls I had gathered was missing a single critical element to complete my desired shroud. I was in the process of synthesizing that missing element when you all showed up again. But, I am in luck! Those causal waves your friend there was giving off were exactly what I was waiting for. So, I just used a little backdoor I left in all my experiments to ‘snip’ that bit of his soul out. Poor thing likely won’t survive, though your friend is doing a surprisingly admirable job of fixing it. Actually, she’s doing an amazing job, if my scans are right. In fact-”

Caeden whipped around before the founder could act, calling up an Entrance Blade, moving through Father in the Blade Forge, and activating his Incarnation. A dozen metal arms extended out through the Entrance Blade and scooped up both Cat and Erik before the founder could get any ideas about his other friend. Hopefully, Father would be able to help Cat in the Forge with fixing Erik. But he wasn’t sure. For all that Caeden had the power of an omnipotent god in the Forge, randomly playing with souls was something he was loath to do.

“Oh ho ho! Now we see it! I was wondering if you’d end up using one of them where I could get a good scan in. Let’s see here…” The founder ignored the increasingly aggressive behavior from everyone else in the room. “SO much to do, so much to do. Oh, if any of you get some bright idea about killing me, I have the same backdoor in this gentleman here. A threat to me results in his soul detonating. So I’d be very careful.”

At that, Caeden did roll his eyes. He was done messing around. He didn’t doubt that the founder was speaking the truth, he just wasn’t concerned. “Let’s get this out of the way, then. Because there’s no way we’re letting you finish that shroud.”

He stepped forward, and the founder snapped his fingers. Then Caeden’s world went white.

{}

Lily watched as Caeden took a step before literally exploding. She flinched, but didn’t let herself make a thoughtless reaction. Looking around, she saw that the Forged Throne and the Entrance Blade were still there, still fine. Caeden wasn’t dead.

That didn’t mean she wasn’t pissed.

“Oh, now why did he have to go and do that? Now I won’t get to study this interesting…portal…But it’s still active?” The founder looked at the Entrance Blade in confusion. “Oh, shit!”

He noticed the spear of ice right before it impaled his head. A quick duck saved his deformed face from a much more deadly disfigurement. The next five spear were blocked by an energy barrier that sprang into place. But it dropped a moment later when a wave of Mithril washed over it, sapping all the power.

Instead of ice spears, a dense beam of light attempted to bisect the founder. But he lunged behind the cage holding Damon, and Lily had to cut off her attack with a click of her tongue. He was a slippery target. And now he was running across the workroom, toward what Lily could only assume was the suppression field generator. Something that was apparently also a container for the souls of millions of shrouded. And the incubation chamber for the founder’s shroud. That couldn’t end well.

“Hurry up Caeden.” Lily muttered, firing off another wave of attacks, these ones intercepted by shrouded Ethermen that started flooding into the room. “He’s going to make us work for this.”

{}

Father felt the moment that his body outside exploded and he became the totality of Caeden once more. Of course, that experience took a backseat to handling the almost total dissolution of his soul that was happening at the same time.

In the Blade Forge, Caeden’s body didn’t experience the same sympathetic reaction to the soul damage that he did in the Starry Sea universe. But his soul was still damaged. Fortunately, the Blade Forge itself was wholly unaffected. That at least answered one pressing question he’d always had. Would the Blade Forge domain survive his death?

If the current circumstances were anything to go by, it would be fine. Rather, as his soul unravelled, the Blade Forge was a solid foundation that remained stable. Working swiftly, Caeden used the power of his shroud in this place to extend into the rest of his soul, working to hold it all together.

At the same time, he was hunting. The founder had said there was a ‘backdoor’ in his soul, and Caeden meant to root it out. After all, it would be meaningless to cross back over only to get his body splattered and soul broken once again.

That search was made easy by the very damage he’d taken. He just had to follow the damage back to source, where he found an innocuously small bit of soulstuff that was obviously wrong, once he got a closer look at it. In the complex noise his soul normally contained, it would have faded into the background. But it stood out now, being unaffected compared to the devastation that surrounded it.

At the same time he was tearing out that artificial bit, Caeden reached through the Forge and into Erik’s soul, who was undergoing a very similar problem. Similar, but different. The founder hadn’t tried to simply obliterate Erik’s soul, like he had Caeden’s. Instead, he’d removed a portion with surgical precision, using that backdoor as a scalpel.

The end result was the same, Erik’s injured soul was causing his body to fall apart, which was causing further damage to his soul, in an endless feedback loop that was destroying him. He had an advantage over Caeden, in that the initial damage was far less, but he didn’t have the strength of the Blade Forge to fall back on, so he had no way to put the death spiral in check.

Rather, he’d only survived so far because of the two pronged efforts of Cat and his own Healing shroud. The shroud was working overtime to keep his body stable, while Cat tried to stem the soul damage. However, neither was making much progress, and Caeden quickly figured out why.

Some lingering pieces of Erik’s soul still fit the criteria assigned by the backdoor, so it continued to run rampant, trying to cut out those last dregs. The speed at which it moved was too fast and too complex for Caeden to follow. Souls were not his domain, not even within the Forge. But he could see the bits it was trying to sever.

So, to save Erik, Caeden finished the job. With those last bits cut out, and with far less damage under Caeden’s much more careful hand, the backdoor stopped its rampage. Then, Caeden ripped it out as well.

“Thanks, Father, you saved him.” Cat sighed, continuing to pull Erik back together. Now, with much more success.

“It’s Caeden, right now. The me outside died from the same thing that almost took Erik. Now, I need to kick the both of you out. All the Bladeborne have already been moved to Baserock, even the Ancients. My soul damage was far more extensive, and I don’t want anyone here for what I’ll have to do to fix it. I’m not sure what the end result will be.” Caeden sighed. He regretted booting them so quickly, but the current holding pattern he was keeping his soul in couldn’t stand for long.

“Erik is still-”

“Erik is fine. You know it, I know it. He’s just mending. And if there’s one thing Erik doesn’t need help with…”

“It’s fixing himself up.” Cat sighed. “Alright, boot us out”

So Caeden did. Then, for good measure, he released his Incarnation and closed all the Exit Blades. Finally, his focused shifted back to his mess of a soul.

“Huh. this is the second time I’ve been entirely cut off from the greater universe. How’s that affect the time stream?” Caeden’s senses informed him that, while time in the Starry Sea had basically stopped compared to the Blade Forge now that he was almost completely disconnected from it, so long as any product of the Forge existed outside the Forge, he couldn’t infinitely speed up time within without consequences for everything that existed outside it’s bounds. Time would still pass in the Starry Sea relative to him, just infinitesimally slowly.

It also meant he was on a very, very long timer.

“Well, let’s get to work.”