The Truth Finally Came in Treason (II)

Was… was it finally over?

No one and nothing answered.

Something bubbled under the surface of his mind, took form in his chest, filled his lungs all the way to the brim then burst out.

Laughter.

For the first time in his life, Cyrus Anwar honestly, unreservedly laughed.

And laughed.

And laughed.

He wished he could claim it to have been a rumbling, pleasant laugh. Or he would have, had he the mind for it. As it was, he didn't.

He just laughed, and it was a hysterical thing expressing only disbelief. Hardly the sort of happy sound his father would have wished for him to-

The sound abruptly cut off.

Gorion falling, surprised, arm coming apart at the shoulder.

Father.

How could he have forgotten!?

He turned his attention back to the Prime Material plane without any sort of grace or calculation, save what he needed to think up ways to use his newly mastered divinity for healing – Will imposition to brute force the process? No, liable to leave long-lasting imperfections. Open a channel to the Plane of Positive Energy? Insufficient information or experience, method of filtering the energy into usable form unknown, likely to cause self-destruction if it worked at all. Base template off Saff of Healing then and go from there – but it turned out that whatever he intended to do would have to wait.

The moment he tried to open his eyes to the waking world, his awareness expanded in a vertigo-inducing wave, filling the whole room in an instant – Imoen to the right, father ahead just behind the double diamond screen, Eminster and Khelben on either side, hurrying to his side, Bentley Mirrorshade half-stunned and half-distressed in the doorway – then cascaded outwards and through walls, floors, ceilings and beyond until it covered the entirety of Friendly Arm Inn and a fair way into the surrounding area. Several dozen souls came alight in his mind immediately, from the less troublesome ones like the loitering hobgoblin bands to the bounty hunter that had been dispatched to kill him and who was just entering the grounds. He'd have to be pacified as soon as possible – Wizard specialist, evil, multiple bounties claimed, all of 250 gold or less, challenge minimal, best solution for securing the peace of all involved: death – along with that half-orc blackguard – more blood on his hands than whole mercenary companies, several villages slaughtered down to the youngest babe, likelihood of current revenge quest enabling any sort of redemption: null, only solution for the inner and outer peace of all involved: permanent death – and possibly six or seven of the commoners currently taking advantage of the Inns's services. There were one or two matters involving the ones in the same room with him that that would have to be pacified as well – Gorion's continued insistence on being a martyr, Khelben's involvement with a certain potion and Elminster's most recent paramour – and one plan of Imoen's that would need to be avoided to prevent Elminster from losing his own inner peace – prevent theft of pipe, or alternatively deny Imoen the knowledge of the code words and phrases for the recall and activation functions – but those could wait. The specimens below were more problematic, and while some would balk at the idea the fact was that in a world like Toril peace relied on prevention as much as it did diplomacy, and it was a simple fact that for peace to work out some people simple had to die-

Cyrus wrenched himself back from the Prime and secluded himself from everything, curling on himself in the middle of that ocean of liquid fire and gripped his head with both hands, shuddering all over. He almost hadn't managed to work up the thought or even intent to break off the… whatever it had been. Not the thought or the intention, let alone the will. He trembled as he tried to comprehend what had just occurred, and when he managed it he had to force himself not to suffer whatever equivalent of nausea there was… wherever he was.

With more urgency than he'd felt during all but the tensest moments while fighting the Bhaal sliver, he checked, rechecked and scanned the entirety of that ocean of divine essence for whatever bits and pieces he may have missed. Whatever specks could have caused… would have.

There weren't any.

There was nothing left of Bhaal, save for whatever dusty corpse now floated in the Astral Plane somewhere, if even that. Whatever happened with the other Bhaalspawn might or might not lead to his resurrection in the future but that didn't really matter to him now, not really. He doubted he qualified as a Bhaalspawn anymore even, since he had no essence of murder anywhere in that sea.

No murder essence and yet the first thing he'd done upon awakening had been to plan the premeditated murders of a bunch of people for the greater good. For the sake of peace.

A realisation as a child. A gleeful god shard tearing, wrenching, taking out a piece of him. A Dagger of Bone that speared him in the heart and proceeded to fill him with the essence of murder, inch by inch with every month that went by.

Cyrus Anwar stared at the knife in his hand. He wished he could blame it for that perceived lapse, but it was his entirely, just like the calm/bright/anything as everything else in that place. Which only left…

Himself.

His scan of himself was frantic, desperate, mind and soul turning to behold itself all the way to the core, and when that didn't reveal anything he went deeper, and when that didn't yield anything he looked sideways, downwards, upwards and every other direction all at once, even directions that weren't directions. When even that wasn't enough, he set a sliver of his mind to the Prime and scanned his physical body – only his physical body – down to the smallest organ, then the smallest cell, then beyond even that until he saw the bonds that held in whole against natural forces. He found nothing.

Undeterred, he returned to his body entirely, save for whatever mind he needed to keep full awareness and control of the demiplane, then looked at everything again, all at once, not entirely surprised to see the material and immaterial parts of himself equal more than the sum of their parts would logically warrant. Still he found no trace of Bhaal anywhere, so he decided to try one last thing. Calling on the divinity he'd claimed, he filled himself as much as he could, then he looked at it and himself at once.

The first thing he found out was almost wondrous: the soul, the mind, the body, the spirit generated by them all, they were individually or together made of pieces of all planes. Or was it that they were made of whatever had preceded the planes before they were separated? There were many questions and implications, all of which the dwarf would have loved to contemplate at length if not for what he found next.

What he found were chains.

Chains with hooks on every link.

He almost lost the vision due to the shock of that sudden… metaphor? Did the word even fit when seeing something so clearly and specifically depicted?

Reeling and needing time to come to terms with the implications, he looked… "away" to the other strange thing that had been revealed to him but which he'd nearly missed. Specifically, the Weave of Magic.

Or, rather, the two versions of it. The version on the Prime that was most definitely alive and the version in the Astral Plane which was… not. But wasn't dead or undead or whatever else either. It was… the Weave. And it worked just fine. Even more strangely, everything he'd become was telling Cyrus that the not-alive Weave was the natural one. The "normal" type of Weave of Magic.

It brought up a few things based on his very, very extensive readings in the past. Starting with how, looking at it from an outsider's perspective, the fact that Toril had its own Goddess of Magic was strange. For every other world in Realmspace and every other Plane the deity of magic was Boccob, with the one exception of Oerth which also had Wee Jas, but she was an intermediate deity effectively subordinate to the former. And nowhere in Boccob's portfolio (as sages knew it) was there anything saying that he maintained the Weave. Yet Toril's Crystal Sphere apparently needed its own greater deity over magic. Why? Otherwise irreversible damage during some divine conflict? Dawn War? No, that was just a tantrum by Lathander. The war between Gods and Primordials? Maybe, but accounts had Mystryl emerging from a mix of Selûne and Shar while the two were having their own squabble over whether Abeir-Toril should have light even before that mess of a conflict. Mystryl apparently emerged as a being inextricably linked to the Weave – for some reason – when Selûne hurled a piece of herself through Shar and… that was it. Now, every time Mystryl or her successors died, magic failed in the world entirely, or went insane.

And all the while, the Weave was just fine everywhere else.

Explanation? None ever provided in anything he'd read, and he'd read a lot. Hypotheses? The sundering of Abeir from Toril ripped the Weave at the seams or otherwise weakened it to the point where it didn't work? Possible, since the few records about Abeir say that the world has no magic at all and generally no other spell-like abilities either, save for innate feats like dragon's breath and some artefacts made of some material or other. Damage to the firmament of the Torilian crystal sphere that needed more active maintenance since? Possible but not likely, the world spun just fine after Karsus killed Mystryl, though granted that only lasted a very short time. Magic deity needed in order to keep the Weave on this side of the Abeir-Toril split so that none of the Primordials or Great Dragons there can find their way here and cause problems? Not altogether unlikely, though with how many issues Toril already has it was unlikely that a new faction or two would really make much of an impact.

So… Toril's Weave was a patch in an otherwise natural and intrinsic layer of reality.

Setting the matter aside to be discussed with people who might know more (or not discussed, depending on how cagey Mystra decided to be and ordered her Chosen in turn to be), Cyrus decided he'd stalled enough and looked at the chains again.

Chains. Chains with hooks on every link. Hooks that he was caught in. Or, rather, hooks that had been driven through his mind, body, soul and spirit equally. Concepts. Narrow definitions.

The domains of gods.

Absurdly, something Father told him long ago came to the forefront of the dwarf's mind when he realised just what he was seeing.

Listen well, son. A competent person should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, craft a masterwork, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects.

Magical specialisation notwithstanding, he supposed.

Some of the short speech had been censored at first, before the truth of his parentage came out and Gorion couldn't justify his decision to keep his son away from the idea of slaughtering living things, even just for food. But eventually he'd shared with him the whole thing.

Cyrus wondered what Gorion would say if he knew he'd indirectly likened gods to insects. Amusement? Laughter? Embarrassment?

Cyrus only felt ill.

The chains hadn't even had the grace to just curl around him and at least pretend to be gentle while playing tug of war with his soul. No, he literally had countless holes that hooks hung off in every direction, one for each chain, one chain for each godly domain. Just like there was one chain and one hook for every god in the souls of everyone else no doubt. All to syphon the power of Portfolios. A person's actions in life only determined which chain got to pull it furthest in its direction. The only "freedom" people had from this was rejecting the gods altogether, and that was not only a delusion but a sure way to the Wall of the Faithless and oblivion. Eventually. After a long time of horrible torment.

So…

Good news first. He wasn't insane just because he finally gained an emotional range wider than a teaspoon. However, he did have a problem in that he'd aligned his essence with "peace" and the half of the concept that covered inner serenity, tranquillity and letting things go was already claimed. By Eldath to be exact.

The only deity of peace on Toril and she was a minor Power. If that didn't spell out just how terrible straits the world was in, nothing did.

Bad news, he'd be compelled to see things and act according to a new pair of tinted glasses from now on, if things were left as they were. Before it had been death – specifically murder – to the point where he equated entropy to it even though death was just a part of it in the grand scheme of things. The same way the stillness of death was just one type of peace.

And to think people wanted to be gods. They'd just be swapping this ugly, albeit sickeningly balanced, state of affairs for a single filter through which to perceive reality, becoming slaves to their narrow views versus being effective servants of all deities at once. Only Greater Powers had a better deal because they held multiple portfolios, presumably.

Cyrus pondered the fact that he felt sick despite that he was technically seeing and feeling things with his soul. If everything he saw was filtered through tinted glasses already, then perhaps his perception of godly domains as hooked chains was misleading and made things seem worse than they really were?

He tried to empty his mind and look at everything more objectively.

He managed.

Nothing changed.

Dammit.

Marshalling his will and patience, he looked away from the chains and instead looked outwards at the makeup of the Planes. How much of this would he accurately recall in the waking world, he wondered?

The Planar Tides unfolded around him, coursing in and out and through all layers of reality, each Plane infinite yet somehow adjacent to one, two or even more of them. Alien geometries did not even begin to describe what he saw, but he didn't try to puzzle things out let alone try to look beyond at the Far Realm or pull some other idiocy. That way lay madness.

Literally.

Then again, the Tides moving the Planes weren't much better themselves. He could even see some of what the three still enfolding him did. JUSTICE was actively holding a man prisoner in the Nine Hells for the greatest sin ever committed, one whose consequences continued to slowly kill the Planes even now. That could have been accepted, even though the man – man that was more or other but still looked like a lone human, scarred beyond recognition to the point where his skin looked and felt like rock – was as much a consequence of the events he caused as he was an instigator. Even though it had been a long time since his character and soul had changed for the better. CHARITY seemed benign enough, until one saw that it effectively instigated people to sacrifice even when a different option was available or better. He thought of Gorion then and he nearly lost his focus.

And the Rule of Three… The Rule of Three was the worst, piling up unspeakable evil, obscenities and depravities to unleash upon a single man – a king with a patchwork self and skin of gold – for the sole crime of choosing to have BELIEF in EXPERIENCE.

And Cyrus couldn't exactly blame those impersonal forces of reality for it either, not entirely. Everything else that was supposed to make sense was broken down and spread across the various divine domains, creating a hodgepodge of bonds pulling beings in every direction with just the vague leftovers loose to work as they – presumably? – did in the beginning.

This was Ao's balance.

Forget Imoen's antics, she was sane.

This…

This was mad.

Completely and utterly mad.

Right.

Right. That settled it.

He wasn't touching godhood with a ten foot pole.

Letting his mind loosen and rise from the depths of contemplation where everything was laid bare, Cyrus Anwar weighed his options, discarded the unacceptable ones, weighed the pros and cons of the few ones left and decided to go with something more outrageous than all of them put together.

First things first: separate from the essence.

Clamping down on the entirety of that demiplane, he enveloped it all the way to the borders in his will, then wrapped around it and order it to pull on itself.

The interior didn't change in scope. Not really. But the outside did, shrinking and shrinking even as the interior stayed the same, until the wall passed over and through him, compressing the essence – except not really – in a transparent sphere large enough to hold in both palms but small enough to balance on just one. The white fire that wasn't fire looked like a glimmering, bright cloud of liquid-thick smoke that shone with the light of everything. He'd evoked Imoen's shine and that of his father perfectly. His father back when he was still happy, or as happy as Cyrus had ever known him considering that the man was even then dealing with the trauma of having had his wife impregnated via rape by the worst kind of evil.

The tiny demiplane looked almost exactly like a really full, kaleidoscopic snow globe. Though did it really qualify as a demiplane if it could only hold his soul and divine essence? He peered closer and saw the Dagger of Bone floating aimlessly through the core of that ocean, but he didn't think that counted.

No matter.

Step two: dive back into the depths of awareness until all the chains and all the Tides are laid completely bare again. It went even easier the second time, showing that what he'd done didn't truly count as his essence being separate. He was certain it at least wouldn't unduly influence his mindset now, though.

Step three: Freedom.

Step one of step three bring all the chains, all the concepts all domains, all Tides even, into your full awareness.

He immediately found that he couldn't manage it. There were too many, too different, too complex, impossible to understand entirely all at once. Which was ironic considering that they were ultimately a bunch of artificial creations who together meant nothing more and nothing less than everything. Specifically, "Everything I know and Am." Perhaps he couldn't look at them all because the leftover Tides qualified as missing puzzle pieces that prevented the full picture form forming?

That was okay. One by one then.

One by one by one.

Step two of step three: Replace the hooks.

The divinity poured out of the sphere, drained into his hands and filled him, coursing into and through him, then dove deeper. One by one the hooks were replaced. One by one. Grain by grain. Nothing truly changed, nothing even moved in him really. Not yet. Nothing but the ownership. The claim. He wasn't seeking to break or push or pull at anything, as the hooks were made half from himself, just like the Dagger of Bone. He wasn't going to rip out and cast away everything worthwhile about himself. It would not be freedom, it would be insanity or worse. Each time he finished one hook he moved to the next, starting with the ones belonging to the more unwholesome domains of the evil deities and working his way up the alignment scale until he reached the Good ones. The Good hooks – what an absurd notion – that at least seemed to have caught on the evil hooks as much as they had on the rest of him, as if to reduce the pull those worse domains had on him, and reduce the effect they themselves had by lessening their own. The final five actually stemmed from the same chain, one with links shaped like anvils and hammers, paradoxically enough.

Cyrus Anwar stared at them, conflicted.

Moradin All-Father. The Creator, Dwarffather and Soul Forger.

Was he, though? Did Cyrus' soul actually come from him or did… something else happen when Bhaal begot him? Going by the legend of the Axe of the Dwarven Lords and how it can turn other people into dwarves, dwarves which Moradin was always said to be ever reluctant to let go of and turn back into their original race, even if asked and served well. Based on that legend, Cyrus supposed it was an irrelevant question to ask himself whether his soul came from the Soul Forge or elsewhere.

The dwarf looked closer and tried to empty his mind of bias again. It didn't work much better than before, but the hooks did flicker into full hoops momentarily. Hoops wrapped around him more than through him.

It still didn't deter him. He replaced those too.

There was as little reaction as ever. Which was to say, none. Not that shocking since this was doubtlessly supposed to be impossible and he technically wasn't changing anything anyway.

Not yet.

Once he was done with that, he continued to pull the divinity from the globe – globe no longer, it was much less than before now, much smaller – and did the same to the Tides, since they, too, had him tied up all throughout, though they were more like a net or web or tapestry. Just like the Weave.

He replaced that too.

Once everything was over – it had only taken an eternity and no time at all – he checked, double-checked and re-checked ten or one hundred times everything, just to be sure he'd replaced every hook in his soul, mind, body and spirit alike.

Then he prepared himself for step three of step three and hoped he wasn't doing something supremely moronic.

Step three of step three then…

The Dwarf grabbed hold of all the hooks – because they were his now, even though he'd passed temporary ownership to whoever owned the chain for a moment – and commanded them to change from theirs/bound/whatever-concept-they-worked-by to me/myself/I.

The chains, the Tides, the bonds of divinity, even the Weave snapped off, out of and away from him like taut bands of countless slingshots suddenly loosed.

Thus it was that Cyrus Anwar felt truly free for the first time in his whole life.

Freedom that the Universe decided it didn't approve of at all.

Odds of death: ∞

The dwarf blanched.

The Tides shuddered all at once yet one by one at the same time. He even managed to get a final glimpse of the ones he'd called on before he dislodged himself from them completely. The Rule of Three faltered in setting up inevitabilities against an innocent demigod. CHARITY felt spurned and betrayed, insofar as an impersonal force of existence could feel anything. Deep within the Nine Hells, the hold that JUSTICE had on the man with no name – except he was not really nameless anymore, not really – momentarily broke as it detected someone who'd committed a sin as bad as whatever the poor man had done far in the past.

And from somewhere on high, someone looked down on him, aghast.

So much for that ecstatic peace otherwise known as happiness.

The moment passed – his awareness of everything faded as the last of his connection to anything and everything disappeared – and it was like the whole of everything begun to turn to look in his direction on the tail of BELIEF, JUSTICE and CHARITY themselves. Though it felt more like he'd caused some deep ripples in a pond. Ripples had just travelled all the way to the edge of said pond and were now in the process of coming back to the centre. Coming back to the source and leading everyone and everything right to him.

Everyone and Everything that wanted to kill him.

Because Everyone and Everything wanted to kill him apparently.

And he did mean Everyone and Everything. Capital E.

Cyrus Anwar stared flatly at his approaching end even though he technically didn't see it beyond the infinity of the Astral Sea. Or feel it. Or otherwise sense it was coming anymore, save from the memory of a moment ago. He only knew the end was approaching because of how the odds of his death continued to mount. Was he even supposed to feel that if he'd just freed himself from… well, everything?

The truth finally came in treason, eh little sister?

And how did one add to infinity exactly? Infinity +1 was still infinity!

The dwarf slapped himself to try and regain his senses – short moustache, stubby beard due to the incident of a few days ago, unacceptable, grow back right now and do something about that baldness – and decided it didn't work to bring him back to his senses at all. Not if the only effect was making him decide to grow his burnt hair back. And no, the fact that it happened both there and in the Prime Material was no consolation.

He contemplated the steadily mounting inevitability descending on him from everywhere and looked down at the demi-whatever in his hand. It looked like a small diamond now. Appropriately dwarvish, if nothing else.

Then the odds of death went beyond infinite certainty…

Only to suddenly drop to 95%.

Then 80%

Then all the way to 0%.