Stardeep_ The Dungeons - Bruce R. Cordell [30]
Madness. In the lonely passage of time between shifts, he sometimes wondered. There might be a tinge of madness to his actions. Then again, madness is what those with limited imaginations called inspiration, imagination, and even revelation.
He knew first hand of places where doctrine had taken firm hold, where free thinkers and visionaries were abhorred. But without revelation, civilization's zenith would yet hunker in caves, drawing stick figures by firelight.
True, some prophets walked too close to the line separating inspiration from crazed imprecation. But the ones remembered as paradigm-changers and world-savers far after the fact were derided by their contemporaries. And though they sometimes faltered and fell, others in their wake benefited from the sacrifice.
Telarian's problem was he couldn't wait for the historians of later ages to acclaim his actions as heroic and necessary. What he had to do in the present, without the context the future would bring, was hard to explain to someone who doubted the effectiveness of divination magic to begin with.
Like Delphe. If he told her the truth, her apprehension concerning the predictive arts would lead to questions, accusations. Action. He couldn't afford strife. It was the same conclusion as ever before: he would proceed as he had been.
Thankfully, convincing Cynosure to side with him relied less on the art of persuasion and more on technical wizardry. Telarian had a knack for golem and construct enchantment, despite his primary focus in oracular insight. He had surreptitiously applied that skill to the linked nodes making up Cynosure's mind. After a year of gradual tinkering, the sentient idol was now partially under Telarian's control.
Cynosure was free-willed no longer, though its greater mind didn't realize a lesser portion of itself was almost completely commandeered. Despite this success, Telarian remained stymied; none of the tactics he'd devised had proven capable of overriding Cynosure's control over the Inner Bastion. It was too fundamental to the constructs creation. He eventually realized he would never succeed in gaining complete control of the sentient idol. It had become necessary to pursue other options. Of course, even if he had complete control of the construct, another tool was also required.
He trailed a finger up the length of his sword scabbard. What would Delphe do if she found out about Nis?
He shuddered. He removed the scabbard from his belt, careful not to touch the pommel of the dark blade.
His conscience skittered across the surface of his resolve. Too late. He'd done it; he couldn't undo what he'd forged.
He had learned the secret of the armory's existence, a place created by the previous Keepers, with Cynosure's help. In the armory, he found the vessel containing the split soul.
It was a half-soul, separated from its lighter half. Before being split, all the soul's goodness, all its righteousness, and all its morality were strained and infused into an animate blade of virtuous light: Angul. With that singula! blade, the Traitor's most successful bid for escape in a millennia was foiled. The success of that event was known to all Keepets, though none realized what had gone into making the Blade Cerulean. None now recalled the sacrifice of the man who made the blade's existence possible.
A soul split along philosophical lines has two parts, as there is no light without darkness. Sin would not exist without morality. What is certainty without doubt to measure it against? The half-soul Telarian found was the detritus left over from Angul's forging.
Why the half-sentient thing had been preserved, when it should have been destroyed, was a real question. Perhaps the Keeper who forged it with Cynosure's aid was too sentimental? Or had fate stepped in on Telarian's side? Either way, that lapse was Telarian's opportunity.
His elaborate plan took form in the ashes of dream-tossed nights, as so many of his divinatory visions had since he'd come to Stardeep and looked into the Well. Something had opened in him