Saga of the Soul Dungeon

Hope is not a single flower. It is a vast field. Crush one and you will find yourself still in a full field. Burn them down and their seeds will bloom in the ashes. That is what it means to have hope. It is fragile, but blooms again without end.

-Excerpt from a letter responding to an offer to surrender, Amsidiv, Navashid Rebel General.

==Seer – Alrannorra==

I watched; the world shifted.

Nothing new, time always shifted, and, as a seer, I watched.

I dwelt, often, upon the past, upon the infinitesimal span of my own life, an irony that grew the greater my reach into time became.

Seeing the future, that vision, that perspective, was what we are known for. We could peer deeply into the past, just as well, better in many ways, far more stable.

Not that anyone else understood the truth. That was kept between us, and The System.

My room was a single window, the furniture aligned precisely, their positions maintained. It was a common feature, for a seer. The room was the same, so that even if my gaze is cast forward, or back, I could still navigate past the unchanged geometries.

A glance out the window showed a shifting kaleidoscope of seasons, like a pastiche painting, that would occasionally flicker to some new variation.

Insects chirped on tree limbs, the purple and blue leaves a familiar normality. Ash and fire rained from the sky, a glimpse of possible futures, and an echo of a singular past, though ash and fire had come before, many times. Shurum glowed, heavy and gravid, a giant red orb to match the burning ring of Otga. Void, scattered with stars, absent any sign of The Siblings, was cold and empty.

Void was a constant companion. Most of my visions were filled with it. The heavens were mostly void, and it filled up the vast immensity of both the past and future. Filtering it out was the first task of the new seer.

I allowed my thoughts to dwell there.

I had been new, once, a girl who still had a name, Alrannorra, after my great grandmother. I couldn’t speak the name anymore, and none remained who knew it, other than me, unless the other seers had glimpsed it.

I could still picture it, either on the canvas of my thoughts or through the direct vision of my gift.

I was excited to have a gift for time, then. I was a giddy girl, with a dirty dress, though unconscious of it:

I walked down a hall with my mother, her face anxious. The cleanliness of the hall was normal to me now, the child and mother’s dirty clothes the outlier. It was the reverse then, of course. The clean halls alien to my perception, too wrapped up in nervous excitement to see my mother’s anxiety and fear, chased by hope and guilt.

I could recognize it now. Her fear of losing me, and her hope for the same. The guilt of giving me away, mixed with the hope of a better life for us both.

I had watched them, of course, from afar. It was all I could do. My brothers had gone on to better lives, the coin of my finding paying for tools and apprenticeships. My sisters had dowries to better match their beauty, becoming more than victims.

I watched the girl, enamored of the life her gift could bring her. Even a weak seer wanted for nothing. They never went hungry. We were well cared for, locked away as precious resources, kept polished and pristine.

I hadn’t known what I was getting into, of course, but my family never went hungry again, after I left them.

There were times when bitterness raged in me, when I cursed them for the betrayal, for the abandonment. Such times never lasted long. Not as a seer. Not when I could see countless worse fates. The past was singular, but it still had echoes… reflections, hints of what could have been. Few of the lives I could have had would have been happier than this. And those were the faintest of echoes, mere shadows of possibility.

I suppose it is only human to grasp those with envy, regardless.

Still, mostly I was grateful.

I sent them what help I could, when the fates that I read might impact them. I had taken on clients who would normally have met with a lesser seer, and turned away some of those who could have afforded me. Spoken words one way, rather than another, to gently place my finger on the scale.

I couldn’t lie, as a seer, save in my thoughts. Part of what we are bound to, the oaths that frame our strict relation with the world. There is much we are not permitted to say, to reveal, either.

I hadn’t known what I was getting into, of course, even with The Glimpse.

The System was honest enough about that, at least. It gave us a single moment of the gift in its full potential, its majesty and terror both, before asking for the oaths, before constraining what we could do with our perspective.

My lips curled up at the irony. The fledgling seer, blind to both the true power of her gift, and what it would mean to use it, day after day.

The seer, their eyes wrapped up, that was a common image. People believed it was to shield us from the common world. Blinding our physical sight, so we could only see the future, unsullied by the common vision of the world.

The truth, of course, was the opposite. All our senses could share the gift, it could even function without access to any, but, by default, our eyes were the strongest aspect of it. We covered our eyes because we saw too much. We needed time to train ourselves, to limit what we could see.

A young seer covered their eyes. It was the older and more powerful ones who didn’t need to bother.

I had long grown past it.

I didn’t flinch in horror, anymore, to see the world.

To see someone was to see all that they were, as well as what they could be.

Uncountable deaths lay as futures for us all, and all wore them like clothes. Each person came to me garbed in blood, ash, and rot.

Eating… well. I had learned focus. I could focus on what the meal was now. Not what it had been, or could be.

Seers had a reputation for going mad, but it wasn’t madness. At least not for most of the young.

Those who couldn’t learn to see past the future, or those too tender to bear the weight of the possible horror, these were the seers that didn’t make it. It wasn’t madness, just a disconnection from the present, too caught up the endless barrage of sensation to remain grounded, or chasing beautiful visions to escape the horrors.

I could do that at any time. I could choose to live in paradisaical future.

I wondered why I didn’t, sometimes.

I had lost time amongst them before. Days had been spent there, lost in visions where the whole world was a garden… but I always returned.

Hope was what killed a seer, and what sustained us.

Time was a tree. A single, vast, immeasurable taproot lead back to some unknowably distant beginning. Faint roots of unrealized possibilities surrounded it, leading up to the mighty trunk of the present, which bore the weight of uncountable futures, which faded up and away into mere whips of possibility. The main branches were strong, based on the most common and likely factors. And yet, in a single moment of change, entire branches could wither away, the tree shifting less likely futures into their new strong configuration.

It was my favored way to use my gift, and one of the keys that any seer learned, taking the infinite future and tamping it down into a manageable expression.

The branches of the tree shifted constantly. The main branches were usually stable, though their component twigs danced madly. It was the subsidiary branches that moved like frenzied seizures, rarely staying still enough to properly seen.

Yet, it was the ephemeral, which granted hope, futures as transient and delicate as hope itself, like gossamer webs on the wind.

Every day I saw major branches die or twist into new shapes, but the future was mostly the same.

Until moments like this, and the tree shifted.

All the branches withered to nothing, save a single tattered leaf on a skeletal limb.

I watched; that limb shifted and grew. An impossibility had occurred and the future shifted in accordance with the change.

A man I had seen, many years before, had realized a future I predicted for him.

What he had made was new. Something not done before, in all the long past of the world.

He had asked for an end. And end to the cycle, to the harsh duality of The System that razed the world back down to the dregs of civilization again and again.

And I had offered him a possible way.

I had thought little more of it, since then.

The dream he chased was so slight a chance, so immaterial a possibility as to be nothing. I had sent others chasing similar dreams on probabilities stronger than his, and they had all amounted to nothing.

Still, the future was not certain. It never was, and the possibility I offered him was always couched with a warning. An end was no always a good thing. The void was an end, but not one I wanted for the world.

And the void was a possibility, down this path, along with countless other disasters. And, for all the certainty he had taken from what I told him, the future was not merely aligned with only the end. The cycle could be broken, or it could remain.

I flitted between the leaves of countless futures, seeing what could now be, what ends could be brought to the current cycle:

The whole world, a single vast dungeon, an orgy of violence and evolution without end, with humanity devolved to no more than feral beasts, one among many others.

The world, again a dungeon, but this one a garden. The whole world carefully curated and become like a noble’s garden. All the world kept carefully in stasis, with humanity as carefully pruned and managed as a hedgerow. All gave homage to their new dungeon God.

Shurum and Otga, their orbits disrupted, drifting apart, the whole world locked down in ice as the very air frozen, It fell slowly, stifling the world.

The world aflame as a violent surge of stellar energies crashed against it, casting away vast chunks of the surface into the void, and leaving a molten ruin all that remained.

A vast tree wound its way across the surface of the world, its roots deep enough to drink the molten stone far below. All the world fought in its titanic boughs, islands and continents held aloft in its branches, while seas cascaded over the edge, casting its roots in mist and darkness.

An island braved the void, leaving a ruined world behind, venturing out like a seed, hoping for fertile ground. The island flew farther than her vision could see, its future unknown.

The entire world folded in on itself, vast fragments twisting through space and into the expanding domain of a dungeon, the entire world condensed to fit within.

A wave of force and light, as Shurum and Otga joined for one last time, their dance finally at an end, and their passion ignited fully. The resulting conflagration was sufficient to reduce the whole world to nothing, stone boiling away like mist in the morning light.

If these were all she saw, she might have despaired, but her original vision still remained true.

In addition to the cycle, and the catastrophe, was salvation.

Dreams as she had seldom dared to dream blossomed there. Garden worlds were shaped by man’s own hand. Humanity melded peacefully with the other sapients, coming together to truly understand the world, and to grow in turn.

The dungeon rose as a truly benevolent god, or a teacher, or friend, or simply cleared the way, leaving the world to muddle along without interference, free from the cycle.

Hope blossomed in her chest again, the fragile bloom taking root.