The Star 22

Physical mind and consciousness devolved to chaos. The actions Sonny had taken in the obelisk and their consequences had become a blur of nonsense as he was spit back out into the cavern in a wave of black mud. He couldn't even clearly remember the advice from the card. A breath later, he was too busy trying to fend off an immense spiritual pressure to care about little details.

The dragon ritual's will workings snapped and broke under the weight of the obelisk's press to achieve its goal. Multiple tier seven echoes of power on his soul were like glass panes of spun sugar before it. The artifact was attempting to bond with him. The only thing that stopped it from happening was the appearance of a shadowy figure.

Snatching the shrinking obelisk before it could enter the young adept's spiritual realm, a dry voice said, "What would a little thing like you do with such a precious object? Best leave it in my hands. Consider it repayment for the gift I gave that you have squandered."

Weakly, the young adept croaked, "Be my guest... Elder Void Walker."

"Oh look, it likes me. No more than thought the deed than it abandoned you for me. Not bad for a relic with no proper spirit. How wondrously novel," the shadowy figure said before whisking away with a fawning young woman and curious child in tow.

Sonny muttered to himself, "What's a little thing like me, indeed. Good riddance. Maybe you have a way to deal with all that damning karma but I don't think being The Magician's very fun anymore...

"From the moment I learned about that ritual, I always thought something was fishy about it. Not only can the power easily be used up without a dragon orb that screams your family allegiance, they can monitor and even outright steal opportunities away from those marked. It's a pyramid scheme in line with pact making. The only differences; the power offered, price and interest are potentially much higher."

The familiar voice belonging to his feline featured companion shot weakly back, also sprawled out in the black mud, "Are you surprised? Since when do the powerful give handouts without expecting a greater return?"

Looking over, the young adept said, "I'm kind of surprised to see you spawning from my Deathless Mound with me. Any good stories to share? Because right now, I'm confused as hell."

In a blinking of dark mist, a mud free Cole wearing black armor that appeared 'out of focus', looked back at him from a sitting position in front. "I failed my dark night of the soul, except... now I haven't. If you're asking me, who am I supposed to ask?"

"You don't feel like a tier five to me," Sonny said.

Cole huffed, "Couldn't be happier about that. It's better because I can hold more now. Since you don't look like a ball of squiggle marks that drives people crazy by looking at you, we both have something to be thankful for."

Connecting dots, the young adept said, "Bad future avoided?"

The feline assassin fished through the mud until he found a dirty playing card. "Yeah, I guess... Damn, I lost the bet but so did Grant. Not that he actually agreed to play. I mean, I knew you were a nice guy but... not that nice."

Sonny wicked off the mud with a cast of presto and donned his suit. It took him a second to notice but it felt different, stronger.

"If you're referring to me taking the high road on which advice to follow, I had it on good authority it was the most beneficial one too... By the way, where's Grant and Corvinus?" he said.

Cole stood and stretched out slowly to a series of cracking vertebrae. "Grant's probably closing his circle to gain some immunity to casualty."

Chuckling, the young adept said, "You mean causality?"

Scowling, the feline assassin said, "If you knew what I meant... whatever. Did you know that Grant IS Garret? I mean, like the origin of his soul. Then again, with as screwy as things get, maybe he wasn't at first."

Sonny shrugged.

As he fished around for useful materials in the muck with telekinesis, he said, "I barely have an idea of what you're talking about. I haven't inherited much of Orison yet. I figure I'll know when I have a decent amount because I'll stop thinking I'm Sonny."

Cole said, "Ah... You haven't shook off the ring. It'll break soon anyway."

The young adept stopped what he was doing. "Won't that kill me!?"

"Uh, no... You don't have that freaky outsider artifact digging into you and those stupid dragon whatchamacallits are all broke up. Didn't no one ever tell you that blessings and curses tie up potential? You didn't have none to spare to begin with, doing what you did with all the law squishing," the feline assassin smirked.

Sparing a moment to inspect things, Sonny had to admit, he felt more 'roomy' in a way that was hard to explain.

Cole added, "As far as Corvinus goes... I imagine he want's to check on how things went with his brother and all. Now that he's not mashed together with Regen, he's probably going to cut loose for a few hundred years or something.

"What are your and Grant's plans, moving forward? At least, what you know of them for now." the young adept asked, somewhat dreading the answer.

The feline assassin scratched his chin. "Got nowhere else better to be... Not that I care much what Garret's, sorry, Grant's going to be up to. But, my gold would be on him freeing his girlfriend from 'story world' and trying to have a good life with her before doing crap else."

Seeing the vaguely sad look on Sonny's face, Cole hid ugly feelings to say, "You knew he was bound to shake off that 'protect the owner' mind set from back when he was that robot/golem, whatever he was, eventually. Besides, I'm here. Anything he could handle, I can."

The young adept shook his head. "It's not like I expected him to be my bodyguard forever or something. It's just that we didn't have the chance to do anything, much less friend stuff. Getting to say goodbye and wish him well would have been, I don't know, better than nothing.

"At the risk of p*ssing you off and driving you away too, what's your deal with wanting to turn Orison into a girl and knocking Them up? You obviously know how to get a girl and you don't seem like the type to get hung up on one either. What's the draw there?"

Cole shrugged. "Instinct tells me we'd have healthy and gifted babies. There's not much else to that. Ask Pete. He'd be able to explain it better than me."

Getting red in the ears, he added, "Besides, Orison's my... best friend. So, it would be, you know, better."

Wryly, Sonny said, "Yes... Having children with someone you actually care about IS better. But, you know. There's this thing called love. And having a child with THAT person is the BEST... Who is Pete and how am I supposed to ask them anything?"

On the verge of actually getting angry, Cole said, "I'm not a child. Not everybody's good at everything, alright? I HAVE been married a couple of times. In one go of it, I was even happy... for awhile. I just know me.

"I know I can be a good friend. I think I can be a good dad. But... I'm a crappy husband."

Sonny put a hand up. "Hold on. You want to convince Orison to be a girl, give you a kid and then you go back to being buddies!?"

Nearly growling, Cole spat, "Like you said. You haven't inherited much of Orison yet... He prefers being a guy and likes girls but he can be flexible for a little while if there's a good reason. He doesn't like dragging the kind of girls he's attracted to into this kind of life but I know he wants kids. He's scared to settle down long enough to have one because crazy stuff happens... all the time.

"Between the two of us, we could raise a kid. He would never take a child from their mother but he COULD leave a lover for her own safety. A lover can move on. But, leaving one with his kid... He wants to be a dad, not a sperm donor. It would eat him up... Do you get what I'm saying?"

The young adept, looked at Cole oddly. "And in this hypothetical... he'd be alright toting this kid around in situations where he wouldn't bring a lover?"

Cole sighed. "LIKE... I... SAID... our kid would be gifted and I would be there to help too."

He rapidly appeared and disappeared in wisps of dark mist for a full thirty seconds, dropping off little twigs or petals from vastly different kinds of plants. "Together, we could do it," he added, a little short of breath.

Sonny massaged his head. "Well, it makes a twisted, forced logic kind of sense. But then again... Let's drop that for now... You said something about asking some Pete guy because he could explain things better. Was that just a drop statement or something I need to know more about?"

The feline assassin was more than happy to change the subject. "Look in your portable house ball thing. If he's not there, we need to go find him."

Sonny looked inside. Sure enough, there was an unfamiliar, mostly human looking 'bull man' fishing in the buff at the end of the dock on the lake. Inside the house, Wade was looking himself over in the bathroom mirror, in the middle of a self esteem pep talk. The poor archer was trying not to bawl over the fragile smile on his face.

The young adept held in a laugh. Wade's actions might be comical but the nearly suicidal depression radiating through the bruised, shallow vanity was anything but funny. The young man had lost something important to him and he wouldn't be the first to try to fill the void left behind with relatively meaningless things.

"Is he there?" Cole asked.

The young adept nodded.

"Then you should go talk to him. He's got stuff to share with you. I'll take you somewhere safer than this place while you're in the bottled house," he added.

For lack of any reason not to, Sonny steeled himself and went into the snow globe artifact. "Hey there. Is it alright to call you Pete?"

"I'd hope so, since it's my name," the bull man said amiably as he sat the fishing pole down on a prop stand and looked over at the young adept.

He added, "I'm not one for beating around the bush... Do you mind me representing some folks who owe you?"

Sonny shrugged. "I guess."

Pete chuckled weakly. "You have to say it and mean it. That was good enough for me but I'm not the one you gotta convince."

The young adept put a hand over his heart while giving the sky 'the bird'. "By the power invested in me by the greater tri-state area of paranoia, confusion and ignorance; I hereby invest you with the right to legally represent debtors."

In Sonny's spirit sight, Pete's relatively clear, well condensed soul was instantly covered in a road map of soul marks carrying the young adept's spiritual signature.

Pete laughed a little more freely. "Alright. Now, take these. Toss em into your space and we'll be done with the boring stuff."

The bull man handed him three clear boxes from a storage ring. Inside each was a 'more real than real' piece of crystal. Each carried a dense spiritual attributed essence. Despite essentially being rocks harder than any diamond, Sonny's mouth watered like they were cheesecake. As soon as he put them in his head space, they were ripped straight to the center of his spiritual realm.

For a moment, aside from his mind space deflating like a balloon with a slow leak, nothing happen. Then, he collapsed under an indescribable sensation so far beyond pain, there wasn't a word for it. Three separate sections of the great, ocean blue star of a soul started crunching inward in different ways until they met and began taking some of the qualities of the other.

Concerned, Pete handed him a corked jade bottle of honey scented liquid and a chunk of scarlet gelatin in a magically sealed ceramic pot. Instincts screaming again, he devoured the gelatin and gulped down the bottle of liquid like they would dissipate if he didn't get it all down as inhumanly fast as possible. After that, it was Deathless Mound time.

***

Orison woke up in a large bed surrounded by sumptuous, just shy of gaudy, furnishings dominated by scarlet and gold motifs. Dragon and Phoenix embroidery, the scent of exotic incense and the presence of unfamiliar but pure and nourishing free essence all but mauled him with the awareness that he was in a cultivator's abode. To be more specific, a cultivator's abode that was attuned to him.

At first, he was concerned about the potential of being structure poisoned but the 'heaven and earth' essence floating around was so primally pure, it was very close to what he vaguely intuited as the origin of all essences. Not only that, but his internals seemed to have become a great deal more tolerant to a broader spectrum. Bodily, psionic and magical energies stayed within particular parts of himself but would merge and separate with little issue near the borders of where they met within him.

Looking deeply within, there was layer upon layer of black on darker black. Near the center of a potentially endless feeling spiritual realm was a tiny dot of brilliance throwing hazy green and blue spectrum light across his spiritual void. It was so simple, he felt like he had returned to the beginning. But, he sensed that it only seemed that way because it had grown beyond what he could fathom.

His consciousness was much the same. It was whole and simple. Yet, at the same time, beyond his understanding. He knew himself to undeniably be Orison but the only memories of color and depth came solely from Sonny. It was through the lens of that life he now saw the entirety of his own.

A small part grieved for the loss of the intimate, if painful, connections and attachments he once had. A much larger part felt freed of an immense weight. The compromising part between the two, offered that the memories weren't gone, merely washed of intensity. They were subjective rather than objective and capable of being honored any way his newly reborn consciousness wished. After all, he hadn't stopped being himself.

His thoughts were interrupted by a feather light knock on the bedchamber door that was so inherently unobtrusive, he would have believed he imagined it if his spirit sight didn't see the person shaped aura on the other side. "Come in."

A fresh faced, phoenix eyed young lady dressed in sharp and clean garments the exact same shade as the cherry wood stain of the wood furnishings, curled downward into a kowtow with a grace he didn't think possible for such a reverent gesture. "Unworthy servant Little Moon greets the new master."

"You can call me Orison. Mr. Cantrip, if saying my first name makes you feel uncomfortable. I absolutely despise the moniker 'master'... If calling you Yue doesn't upset you, I'd like to do so," he said with a reassuring smile.

Rising slightly to give him a shy, uncertain look, she said, "Young Hero Cantrip, you are the master of this house and I am the fairy given birth by it. Please allow me to refer to you properly. Else, I will be too distressed to speak!"

The young mage sighed, "So, I'm the one who needs to bear the distress, then. Fine. But, can we do something about this bedroom? I feel like I woke up from a wedding I don't recall being the groom of."

Xiao Yue's eyes widened before suppressing a giggle. "The previous owner had so many... I believe he simply desired to save the décor for convenience, master."

Curiosity piqued, he asked, "Was the previous owner who gifted you to me?"

She frowned with a distant, unhappy look in her eye. "No, master. Young Hero Arentus claimed me as spoils after having slain him. That is the one who gifted me to you through another."

He was about to ask more when she quickly added, "Mr. Taurus waits for you in the office study to answer your many questions, master."

Feeling humorously helpless, he followed her through the large manor. As they walked, she pointed out needful information. She also tried to 'fix' his 'messy hanfu'.

"It's an open front over robe... Yes, I can see that it works with the waist wrap but I like it like this. We're here. Pete hardly even likes clothes, alright!? I doubt he's going to think less of me for... Hey, Pete." Orison said as he ducked inside the study and closed the door to Yue's soft spoken protests.

Inside, Pete, who was helping himself to a tray of snacks and rice wine, said, "Play nice with the little girl. Her story's a sad one that doesn't bear repeating. She's also pretty young for a spirit as advanced as she is."

Orison shook his head. "I gather...So, someone brought Venito back? How? I had it on good authority that I was nuts for past actions and he wasn't real."

Pete said, "He wasn't after the first one. Because, unlike the rest of the sorry lot of us, he actually made it in one try. He thanks you for the free clones and busting the one clone out of Long Garden with the loot, though. Scraping the last remnants of his existence from the lower dimensions helped make 'spirit severing' a breeze for him too. Whatever that is... Lyra was a hot mess but Vinny's got it ironed out."

Looking horrified, Orison asked, "What happened to the poor overwritten soul I thought was the real Venito, the second run?"

"His soul was sent packing back where it came from. That's why it was the same one that was there later. Don't beat yourself up. Greater Reality and Gnarly did that enough," the bull man said dismissively.

"Did I end up 'try hard'ing copies for anyone else?" the young mage said, somewhat depressed.

Pete nodded. "And not a single one didn't end up doing a load of good. But, it's nearly unanimous. It's time for you to do you and let others get on with it, pass or fail."