[SOLS] 2nd Anniversary ‘The Moon and the Stars’ Episode 3 Interlude: ‘Revelation’
s1nful
468K subscribers
817,625 views 5th May 20XX
well boys and girls, i think this is it. we’re done with the prelude and we're diving into the deep end now.
day 4 is gonna be a fucking ride.
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INTERLUDE - Revelation
Summary of previous events
The two Symphonia sisters continue their lives at Nindo, and their paths slowly start to diverge. Luna starts to slowly lose herself in her studies, becoming estranged from her friends as she spends sleepless nights in the library for a whole month. Before she can miss her own birthday, Estelle takes it upon herself to drag her sister out of her solitude to see the Star Festival, where she reminds Luna that she and Belle will always love her, and she does not need to try so hard to live up to false expectations.
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REVELATION
Beyond all that exists, there is silence that devours.
Hear its final breath, which extinguishes the candle, and devours the echoes of life.
Hear ye, pale blue dot, know Infinity’s final Word.
‘I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending.’
And watch as light wavers, as shape becomes shapelessness, as truth fleets into shadow.
Alpha was spoken and from it birthed the stars.
Omega will be spoken, and from it, your world will unravel.
Belle inspected the radiant crystal in her hand.
Memorium.
She clutched it tightly.
For the past year, this strange object, containing a copy of her daughter’s memories, had been her singular focus.
It was odd to think about, honestly.
All those years ago, she had gone out on a rickety boat across the world into an unknown civilisation, hoping to drown out her sorrows and losses by chasing down some stupid fucking dimension-hopping rock.
And look at where that pointless journey had now led her.
She found a strange girl and her little sister, and eventually came to call them daughters.
She reclaimed that old hope of hers, and once again pushed towards that impossible dream.
Where had it all started?
She chortled, tossing the crystal around.
Right, with that damn radar.
Before Estelle was her daughter, before she even had a name, she was just a potential test subject.
She was just another extraplanar anomaly to be dissected and experimented on.
The crystal came to a rest in her palm.
She brushed her thumb over its smooth surface, staring into its strange, arcane lattices.
For old time’s sake, Belle reached to the side, bringing out that handy, ancient anomaly detector.
She held it over the crystal.
It crackled and beeped.
This is where it all started.
This was the strange extraplanar anomaly that had stumped her for all these years, which had filled her with endless fear and worry over her daughter’s safety, which had led them to meet in the first place.
It was in her memories.
In hindsight, that made some sense.
Estelle always was a bit of a strange girl, incredibly mature for her age, even given her circumstances.
Still, though, Belle didn’t really care about the exact details of whatever it was she went through before the two of them met.
There was only one thing she cared about.
Making sure she was safe. Making sure that the Void would not be able to reach her.
There was still one mystery left, at the end of all of this.
The Void wanted her memories.
Why?
What was it within them that was so special? Was it specific information that was useful to whatever entities might have lurked in the Sixth Realm? Was it because of its inherent nature of being extraplanar?
She didn’t have many clues, but all of her research in the past eight years, which she had been diligently pursuing ever since Estelle made the declaration she wanted to attend Nindo, led all to a single road.
Belle placed the crystal down in front of her, letting it rest in the middle of the grand runic circle underneath her workshop’s floor, which when activated, would temporarily ignite Nirvana to power the Ein Sof beacon underneath her home.
She took out her notes.
For the past eight years, when she wasn’t working on constructing the Paradox Engine, and finding a way to manufacture its parts and assemble them, there was only one thing she was researching.
‘Ain Soph Aur’.
The mysterious sixth Spell, never before seen or recorded in Manusyara’s history.
It had to exist. All of her theorems and projections led to its inevitable existence, but there was never any confirmation that it had ever been successfully cast, or if it even actually existed outside of theories.
Through sheer brute force, and careful innovations in methods of invoking Nirvana to avoid the contamination, she had managed to deconstruct most of the Void’s Spells and attain a complete understanding of their mechanisms.
And through those mechanisms, and understanding where exactly the holes and instabilities in their invocations laid, she had managed to reverse-engineer the theoretical sixth Spell.
And through that reverse-engineering, she finally might have done it.
She might have finally found a way to invoke Ain Soph Aur.
Belle sighed.
It was time to put everything to the test.
The Thing from Beyond…
It was time to find out whether or not it truly existed.
There was only one way to find out what this twisted energy wanted from her daughter, and that was to confront it directly.
“Alright,” Belle mumbled, tossing her notes to the side, “one final check-up on the safety procedures.”
Circuit breakers, check.
Null energy purifiers, check.
Samsara circulators, check.
Emergency detonators, check.
Helios Engine, operational.
Alright, it was time to start.
She arranged five candles around the runic circle’s centre, and one by one, lit them, arranging them in the shape of a pentagram.
The first layer of the magic circle activated, isolating the flow of energy from reaching the Memorium.
Belle inhaled deeply.
She blew out the candles.
“Nirvana.”
The world drowned in darkness.
Nothingness swirled around her, storming and spiralling, threatening to tear apart reality’s fabric.
It spotted its target.
It tried to swarm the crystal at the circle’s core, but found itself mysteriously diverted, trapped in an endless cycle of being repelled as it tried to devour the crystal’s lattices.
“Alright, Helios Engine… you’re up.”
She held out the glowing machine in front of her, and ushered it towards the Void storm.
Its mechanisms began to whir.
“Qliphoth.”
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Right above the storm, a pinhole pierced through spacetime, absorbing the nothingness, leaving behind only a strange black dot hovering midair.
Belle reached to the side, pulling open a spare tome.
Null energy levels in the atmosphere, zero.
Alright…
This was it.
She sighed, picking up the Memorium, dismissing the barrier.
She held it up to the dimensional pin-hole.
It hummed and resonated with the trapped Null energy, summoned from Nirvana and trapped by her artificial recreation of Ein Sof.
There was always one thing wrong with the common understanding of the Nirvana ritual.
Why were there five candles?
That number made absolutely no sense.
But no one bothered to try and explore why. Experimenting with Nirvana meant risking letting the ritual be fully invoked, and sacrificing your heart to the Void, fracturing your sanity.
She had spent her entire life trying to figure out how to invoke Nirvana through a proxy, channeling its power through something other than a human heart.
And that led her towards a specific idea.
The ritual only worked with five candles.
Why?
Well, in a strange way, there was only one answer.
There weren’t five candles.
There was a hidden sixth candle, somewhere beyond this dimension.
That was the starting point. That was what led to the instability of the Void’s energy, which led to every invoker of Nirvana self-destructing inevitably.
No one had ever blown out the sixth candle. They didn’t even know it existed.
She closed her eyes and focused, mapping out the hyperdimensional space inside of the Qliphoth Bridge.
She ran through all of her equations, the endless planes, graphs and derivatives.
She drew out infinity in her mind’s eye, and disambiguated the vanishing point.
“Ain.”
The Memorium in her hands started to shine and resonate, singing with an otherworldly hum.
“Soph.”
It rattled, turbulent energies swirling around it.
The crystal was pulled towards the dimensional tear by a mysterious force.
“Aur.”
Belle blew out the sixth candle.
Silence.
Nothing.
An endless void. Infinity without form. Divinity without consciousness. The almighty Nothing, existing before Alpha and Omega.
Belle beheld the Sixth Realm.
A tiny flicker of light.
And then, everything.
A searing pain shot through Belle’s hand.
The Qliphoth Bridge ruptured, an endless tide of Null energy flowing out of it, desperately clawing at the crystal in Belle’s grip.
Belle held back a scream of unknowable pain, the touch of the Void’s energy around her fingers dissolving her senses into pure nothingness.
She lurched over, feeling the vomit rise.
An empty chill shot through her nerves.
Her consciousness blurred, her mind assaulted with an endless onslaught of eldritch screams.
A flood of nightmares blinded her.
Her vision blurred out into an indecipherable mess.
Blood dripped down from her tear ducts.
Impossible knowledge burned her brain.
The circle beneath her flared up, detecting something had gone awry, activating the first fail-safe.
The ritual circle broke.
The Null energy did not stop circulating.
The next fail-safe activated.
Belle found herself unable to let go of the Memorium, her hand completely bound by the Null energy.
She bit her tongue and screamed.
“SAMSARA!”
The Helios Engine spun, lighting up as its mechanisms overloaded.
Pained sparks flew off of it, burning and sizzling the stone as its gears ground, absorbing all of the Void that swarmed Belle.
It groaned and cried as its energy conversion mechanisms cycled through the Four Elements, converting Null into Fire, ejecting it as a massive blast of lightning that charred the entire basement.
Belle felt the Null energy fade.
Her numb hand shook.
The visions and voices faded.
But just before they disappeared for good, she heard one last whisper.
It was coherent.
That terrified her.
You are not the one I await.
She fell over and heaved, tasting the bile on her tongue.
The streaks of blood running down her face dried out.
She huddled herself and shivered, unable to find any warmth in her body.
She panted in uncomfortable silence, steadying herself.
Belle twisted her wrist, which still burned with phantom pains.
The Memorium was completely unrecognisable, morphed into a strange black… thing that almost felt… viscous.
Whatever might have been contained within it had been thoroughly drained, used as fuel for the invocation of the sixth Spell.
Belle got up on shaky knees and dragged herself over to one of her notebooks.
She recounted the experience she just underwent with growing horror as she processed what exactly just happened to her.
And what exactly it was she just learnt.
The flood of alien information that invaded her mind, threatening to corrode her soul… most of it had been dragged away along with the Null energy, leaving her mind fully intact.
She was lucky that the Memorium was only capable of creating a static copy of someone’s memories. The Spell didn't have enough energy to sustain itself.
She bit her lip, furiously clutching onto her notes and theories on Ain Soph Aur.
Most of the information that came with the Spell had faded, but something remained.
She beheld the truth of infinity itself.
It was irrevocably burned into her mind.
That was the sixth Spell.
That was its activation conditions, what it did, and the price that had to be paid.
That was why nobody had ever been able to truly confirm the Thing’s existence, only being able to rely on the incoherent mad babbles of those whose sanities had been crumbled by the Void’s touch.
She had done it, she had unravelled the last of the Void’s mysteries.
Belle’s hands trembled as they tightened even further around her notes.
She was right.
But at the same time, she was so very, very wrong.
The truth left burned into her mind from the incomplete invocation of Ain Soph Aur terrified her.
She knew everything now.
She knew why the Void so desperately hungered for Estelle’s memories.
She knew what satiating that hunger would accomplish.
She knew the true nature of Ain Soph Aur, why no one had been able to discover it or invoke it before her.
It was an impossible Spell. It could not exist, not naturally.
The implications were world-shattering.
This information…
Could it be allowed to exist?
Two voices screamed internally, fighting against each other.
There were her instincts as a witch, telling her that knowledge was knowledge, that this discovery was revolutionary, that it could change the world.
It wasn’t a selfish thing either. It wasn’t knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
People had to know the truth. There were things out there beyond their comprehension, lurking, just waiting for the moment to strike. People needed to know what was out there, so they could defend themselves from it.
If she did not publish this information…
Then who would?
Would anyone else who came after her be foolish enough to pursue this same path?
And if they were, would they be as impossibly talented enough to succeed in the experiment as she had?
Who was to say that it would not horribly backfire, that their fail-safes were insufficient, and their attempted invocation of Ain Soph Aur would be horribly butchered, inevitably leading to Manusyara’s doom?
She was the only one who could give the world this knowledge, which would one day, in the far, far future, hundreds or thousands of years down the line, save them from the end.
At the same time, though…
Her instincts as a mother told her that the information was terribly dangerous.
It could not be allowed to spread.
Her discoveries could not only be used for enlightenment, to alert those to its existence and to teach people how to defend themselves against it, but it could be used for evil, too.
If the information went out, it would go out to everyone.
There was no guarantee that only well-intentioned people would learn of it. There were many, many dangerous parties out there who would seek to use the information for their own malicious purposes.
And even if she tried to hide it, even if she purposely burnt all of her tracks and did everything she could to conceal her family, they would inevitably find the key to all of this, the only way to invoke the sixth Spell.
Her daughter, Estelle.
Shedding the light on the truth of Ain Soph Aur meant exposing Estelle to danger.
It meant that she would never be able to sleep peacefully again. It meant that every night, she would constantly have to live in fear of the unknown parties that were out there seeking to rip the memories from her mind.
Could she, as a mother, let that happen?
Could she protect her daughter if she let the world know of the truth?
“…”
She silently stared at her notes.
Seconds stretched into minutes. Minutes seemed to slow down, extending into hours.
Her fingers tightened around her notebook, containing all of her notes on the Void.
There was only one way to do right by Estelle, to make sure that she would live happily.
Her stare turned into a glare of resolution.
Belle ripped out the pages involving Ain Soph Aur.
She held her fingers to them.
A small flame lit up on her fingertip.
She watched as the pages withered into ash.
No one could know of what happened today.
No one except for two people.
There was only one thing left to do now.
This was her final task as a mother before Estelle became an adult, before she grew independent and started to live her own life away from her mother’s nest.
Belle stormed out of the basement, stomping through the corridors of her home.
She slammed the back door open, entering her daughter’s beloved garden.
Estelle flinched at the sound, looking up behind her with a small bit of panic.
“M-Mother?” She blinked warily, putting the basket of peppercorns to the side.
She bit her lip in worry, looking at her mother’s deadly serious face.
“Is everything alright?”
“Have you decided who you’re apprenticing under in your seventh year at Nindo?”
“H-huh?” Estelle stammered lightly in confusion, staring at her like a lost deer at the grave tone of her mother’s voice.
“N-no, I haven-”
“Good,” Belle cut her daughter off, “I’m taking you in then.”
“M-Mother?” Estelle’s eyes widened, “S-sorry, what’s all of this about? You know that there’s not much that I can-”
“Forget all of that,” Belle glared, “forget everything you think you know about me. Forget about even graduating from Nindo.”
She clenched her fists.
“I’m not letting you go out into the world until you’ve learned everything I have to teach you.”
Okay, so, the purpose of Ain Soph Aur isn’t meant to be a secret to you, the reader, but it is meant to be a secret for the players of the game. They’re being kept in the dark as to what it does because it’s meant to be a pay-off for something in the far future.
There’ll be an explanation of what it actually does fairly soon when we return to Estelle’s perspective.
