Ch234-Birds Of A Feather (Patreon)

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Ch234-Birds Of A Feather

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“I’ll talk first, my story is shorter,” Edmund said, as he gestured for Sylver to take a seat on his coffin.

The sun reflected off the glass floor and burned away layer upon layer of Sylver’s shadowy skin. Small pieces came off in wisps of black and disintegrated as they fell, without ever reaching the floor.

“I was born into a family of sheepherders. Normal-ish childhood, but then-” the skin on Edmund’s hands turned an ashy grey, with bright glowing cracks of red extending up to his elbows, “-the farm got attacked. The local lord attacked the farm, killed my family, and tried to burn everything down,” Edmund explained, as he made a grabbing motion towards the floor with his left hand.

A glowing square appeared on the glass underneath Sylver, and as if it was about to break apart, the edges of the square spread outwards. As the cracks lengthened, the square glowed brighter and slowly the edges rose out of the floor and began to form into a cube.

“So, I have a giant hole where my left lung used to be, and then they threw me into the house, where the rest of my family’s corpses are. Somehow, I realize I can absorb the flames, and more importantly, I can steer them. I break out of the burning building, in a blind rage kill everyone in sight, and-”

“You were reborn without your memories,” Sylver interrupted, just as the cube finished forming around him, and gradually began to fill with a brown-colored flame.

“It was my body, but it wasn’t me. I appeared all at once when “I” turned 28,” Edmund said, as the brown flames flooding the cube Sylver was sitting inside passed through his pitch-black torso and latched themselves onto the small piece of flesh inside his shiny indestructible ribcage.

Sylver leaned back and allowed himself to rest against the wall of the cube he was inside.

“That’s about the age you looked when…” Sylver let the words trail away, but found that instead of a grief so deep he couldn’t handle it, he instead felt…

Nothing.

Not actually nothing, he still felt upset, sad, devasted, but it was no longer this overflowing basin of pain, it now felt like a much more manageable bottle. He could tell the glass was brittle, and the cork keeping it closed was the barest shake away from exploding, but at the very least he could look at the bottle, without immediate being splashed with gut-wrenching aching.

“I’m fairly certain even the facial hair was exactly the same,” Edmund said, as the little blob of flesh that composed about 80% of Sylver’s body sprouted a vein, traveled upwards, and expanded into the outline of a heart.

The heart began to beat, and with each beat, spread arteries and veins out through Sylver’s shadowy body, as if it was a seed spreading roots.

“Anyway… The first couple of months are a bit blurry, I didn’t handle… what happened all that well, and the person who I replaced had steady access to a variety of women, narcotics, intoxicants, and other sorts of distractions, which I took full advantage of. I assumed that my dead soul was trying to calm me down, or something to that extent, and just went along with it,” Edmund explained, as Sylver shook his head.

“You never died. I mean, you died back then, but your soul hasn’t been dead,” Sylver said.

The brown flames that had stabbed themselves into Sylver’s body flickered and turned a darker shade of brown. Sylver held back a gasp as he felt bones appear inside of him and nudged them where he wanted them to be.

“So, I died, but the soul of the me that stands before you has never been dead…” Edmund asked.

Sylver rubbed his nonexistent eyes with the palms of his hands, as the brown fire continued giving him more and more bones.

“I wasn’t at my best during the last moments, I may be wrong about you being dead. But… if that sword was enough for Aether, I don’t think you… If anyone’s bloodline magic could make something like this possible, it would be yours. I’m going to run a few tests when we get home, let’s talk about this part then,” Sylver explained.

The rule with magic was that the impossible was impossible.

Up until it wasn’t.

Just because master necromancers like Sylver believed that removing the “scars” of death from a soul was impossible, didn’t necessarily mean it couldn’t be done. Especially for someone like Edmund, his soul was so far above “alive,” that it almost made sense that the “scars” would heal, given enough time.

Sylver lifted his head and nodded at Edmund to continue.

“Once I calmed down a little, I started asking around, surely the queen of a country would know about the Ibis, or at the absolute least heard about one of us,” Edmund said, as Sylver felt his lung organ gradually appear within his chest and felt the uncomfortable feeling of having air forcibly inserted into it.

“It was as if we never existed,” Sylver guessed.

“See, that’s the really weird thing. We never existed, and yet, everything we did very much happened. The names are different, and some of the details have been fiddled with, but the volcanos I tore open are still there, and the obelisks you created are exactly where you left them, I even found a school of healers that use the exact healing practices Adema invented,” Edmund explained, with just a hint of a frown leaking into his voice.

Sylver knew what Edmund wasn’t saying. What he wanted to talk about but was given a warning just for considering.

“Is this a Cassato, or a Cosirius, situation?” Sylver asked hopefully.

“Both? Sort of. Do you have a workaround? Because I know something that might help,” Edmund said.

Sylver felt his spinal discs snap into place and then stretched his newly formed limbs outward. The brown fire became even darker, as muscles, internal organs, eyeballs, all the squishy parts basically, began to grow around Sylver’s partially formed skeleton.

“I have a plan, but it’s going to take a while,” Sylver answered.

Cassato, and Cosirius, were exceptionally powerful clairvoyants, powerful enough that their range extended to every inch of Eira.

Cassato could manipulate information that involved him, if Sylver tried to tell Edmund that Cassato had black hair, Edmund might hear Sylver say that Cassato has blue hair, or white, or blond, or he might not hear anything at all.

The only information that couldn’t be manipulated, was firsthand knowledge. If someone saw, with their own eyes, that Cassato had black hair, even if they couldn’t communicate that information to anyone, Cassato couldn’t stop the person from knowing.

Cosirius on the other hand locked information away.

With Cassato, you could know something about him, but you couldn’t share it.

With Cosirius, he could plain and simple stop you from knowing something. It didn’t even need to be something about him, if he was close enough, he could make a person forget how to walk, or breathe, he could even make a mage forget how to use magic.

Since their supposed defeat, the two names have been used to mean that either a person was incapable of sharing something that they knew, or they “knew” something, but didn’t know it.

“I’ve met people who knew about me, about you, and they-” Sylver started, but was interrupted by Edmund before he could finish.

“Do they have massive gaps in their memories? Or they reincarnated, spent a couple thousand years asleep, something like that, right? All the people who know about us have a period where they were completely unaware of their surroundings,” Edmund interrupted, and Sylver could do little but nod.

Sylver’s vision cleared up a bit, as his right eyeball formed, and connected to the slurry of meat that was gradually turning into a brain.

“There are… I want to say 3, but there are 3 more that I don’t know for certain. But the 3 I know in person, are exactly like you said, Lola just sort of appeared where she did, and Faust and Bruno have massive holes in their memories,” Sylver explained, as his second eyeball materialized inside his upper skull.

Edmund waited for a few seconds, so Sylver could concentrate on adjusting his bone structure before the muscles started getting in the way.

“How long have you been up and about? 173 isn’t bad, especially considering how crippled the [Necromancer] class is, but… I’m going to guess 1 year. Maybe 2?” Edmund guessed.

“Year and a bit. I haven’t really kept track. But that’s from my perspective, from the perspective of this realm, it’s been over 6 years. What level did you get to before you ended up in your coffin?” Sylver asked, and Edmund seemed to remember that he had been in the middle of telling a story.

“I was just shy of hitting level 1,500. You can’t imagine how bad the experience curve gets once you get past 500, and talk about -” Edmund closed his eyes and ground his teeth for a few seconds. Oddly enough, Syvler was happy to see Edmund was hurting, as terrible as that sounded.

“Let’s just enjoy the fact that we’re both here,” Sylver said, as the flames surrounding him became darker and darker.

The two men didn’t say anything for a while, as Sylver nudged Edmund’s healing magic where he needed it most, and by the time Edmund stopped grinding his teeth and calmed down, Sylver was once again whole.

He was naked, but [Greater Undead Armament] provided him with a passable robe.

Edmund in turn looked like he was wearing shirt and trousers made out of black sand. Every time he moved; the material sparkled as if it was embroidered with extremely small gems.

While Edmund continued telling an abridged version of his story, Sylver used the time to stretch and realign his mana channels.

His body wasn’t just “whole,” it felt better than it ever did. The tiny pieces of metal that sometimes made themselves known by scratching against his spine were gone, as were the various stitches Sylver had been using to keep his left arm attached to his torso.

It even felt like his blood was flowing better than it had before, although that part might be more to do with Sylver’s current mood, as opposed to any physical changes.

Healing an undead is impossible.

Unless you’re a world-class healer, that went out of his way to figure out a method through which he could heal his undead companion.

Due to the nature of his magic, Edmund was capable of inverting his mana, which in turn meant he could cast the opposite of healing magic, which in turn translated into magic that could “heal” an undead.

Sadly, Ed’s “undead healing magic,” didn’t work on undead other than Sylver.

Few know this or bother to learn this, but healing magic has to be adjusted for the person being healed, the adjustment can range from minuscule, to massive. Catch-all spells do exist, but their effectiveness is abysmal, to the point they’re almost useless.

In Sylver’s case, the way Ed explained it, the spell he used to heal Sylver barely worked on him, and there wasn’t enough space in the spell’s framework to adjust it to work on anyone other than him.

It would be more correct to say that Sylver just so happened to have the right combination of soul and body, for Edmund to craft a spell that could heal him. Sylver didn’t know enough about healing magic to advise Edmund on the matter, but how many undead did they even know that needed Edmund’s undead healing magic?

Anyone powerful enough for Sylver to know them by name, let alone Edmund, were nigh immortal on their own, from liches to vampires, undead very rarely lived long enough to become strong, without having a method through which to heal themselves.

As Edmund had said, his story was rather short. He spent the majority of his life flying from one catastrophe to the next, demon lords, crazed sorcerers, cults, and so on, and so forth.

By the sound of it, Edmund was so busy playing hero, that he barely had the time to look for members of the Ibis. He asked for the aid of whoever he saved, to at the very least spread his name, so someone who knows him might hear it, but neither Sylver nor Lola found so much as a mention of Edmund’s name in the history books.

But, to his credit, he did pass through the Asberg to see what had happened to the physical location where the Ibis was.

It was gone.

As if it had never been there in the first place.

“I asked a few clairvoyants, seers, and various mages with analysis-related magic to help me, but the answer was always the same. There’s nothing there,” Edmund said.

Sylver ran his hands through his hair and closed his eyes for a while.

He felt like crying.

Just a bit.

It wasn’t as if he expected Edmund to have the answer to every single question he had, but by the sounds of it, Ed had even fewer answers than Sylver. He didn’t even know why he went from an old man to a child, or why he glassed a giant piece of land.

“If you’re here, that means there’s a chance the others also somehow survived,” Sylver said after a long and uncomfortable pause.

“Unless you remember that my bloodline magic is, objectively speaking, the closest thing to man-made true immortality, and you’re a man that knows more about escaping death than every necromancer who ever lived put together,” Edmund said in a tone suggested his words were a compliment, as opposed to a slap across Sylver’s optimistic face.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Sylver said, as he stood up from Edmund’s coffin.

“Why? Because you think you’re such a monster that you don’t deserve-”

“Oh, no, I meant I shouldn’t be here in the sense my spell should have ended me. I didn’t fuck it up, I don’t fuck spells of that caliber. He was a chronomancer, anything less than total annihilation would have been barely a scratch to him. Now that you’re here, I at the very least know that whatever brought me back wasn’t a one-time thing,” Sylver explained in a rush as Edmund’s mildly confused expression gradually turned into a grin.

“That’s actually a good point…” Edmund said.

It was only now that he looked around and noticed that they were standing on top of a seemingly endless ocean of glass.

“Don’t worry, we’re in enemy territory, nobody died of value died,” Sylver said.

There was a small chance the Krists had living hostages, or something close to that, but it wasn’t as if Edmund feeling bad about it was going to bring them back.

“I see… And them?” Edmund asked, with a gesture towards the floating golden staff that was Ria.

“One is a magic nullifying liquid golem, that possesses a soul, and the other is a demonic vessel that I have bonded with,” Sylver explained casually. Edmund’s grin grew bigger.

“I can’t tell you how much I missed you man,” Edmund said, with a faint shake in his voice.

“We do actually need to get out of here,” Sylver said, while Edmund looked away for a moment, to wipe his eyes.

“Give me a second,” Edmund answered.

Sylver gestured for Ria to float down to him, while Edmund worked on making sure he didn’t look like he was about to start crying.

“Is everything alright?” Ria whispered into Sylver’s ear, as she tried to hide in his robe, but discovered that the “fabric” wasn’t as dense as she was used to, and she passed right through it.

“Everything is fantastic. Edmund, I would like to meet Ria,” Sylver said, with a gesture towards his golden 3-pronged staff.

“Nice to meet you, Ria,” Edmund said with a nod, with a relaxed and composed look.

“And this is Morana, Mora for short,” Sylver said with a gesture towards the small pale spider sitting on top of his head.

“Nice to meet you, Mora,” Edmund said.

“And this is Spring. He handles the shades I’ve managed to accumulate,” Sylver explained, as Edmund gave the materialized shade a polite nod.

“Alright then. Where are we going?” Edmund asked as Sylver looked up towards the sky to figure out which direction north was.

“That way. I was hoping you-”

Edmund brought his foot down, and a giant crack formed in the glass floor. The crack spread out in an arc and ended up forming a circle around Sylver and Ed’s coffin.

Edmund then proceeded to move his hands in a smooth flowing motion, as if he was playing with smoke.

Ria nearly fell away as the glass platform underneath Sylver’s feet lifted into the air with a lurch, but Sylver caught her before she fell over the edge.

The glass platform rose high into the air, almost high enough to touch the clouds if they hadn’t all been blown away. A moment later Edmund joined Sylver in the air.

He looked as if he was wearing a cloak made out of golden fire, with the barest shade of orange near the bottom tips. As if he had wings that he was too lazy to raise, the blazing cloak appeared almost limp, as Edmund directed the flames to push him forward.

The glass platform underneath Sylver’s feet turned until it was almost perpendicular to the ground. Sylver was ready for it, but in hindsight, he should have warned Ria, because she started to scream, as Edmund exerted his magic onto the glass platform, and caused it to move with the speed of a high-powered missile.

***

[Piss Off – Eat Shit + ??? – 261]
[HP: ??? – ???%]
[MP: ??? – ???%]
[Stamina: ??? – ???%]
[Corpse – Unique]
[Soul – Unique]

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been used!]

“What even is a “[Koschei]?” I feel like I’ve heard that word somewhere, but I can’t put my finger on it,” Edmund asked, as he flew a bit closer so Sylver wouldn’t have to shout.

Edmund was slower than Mora was, but only because he was carrying Sylver with him.

But that was fine, they had left Krist territory a while ago, and neither of them was in any real rush.

“Neither living nor undead. Your life is bound to a silver needle, your greatest strength, as well as your greatest weakness,” Sylver quoted.

“So you have a needle-sized phylactery?” Edmund asked.

“Pretty much. Does it do it automatically? When someone tries to read your status, they get their status read instead?” Sylver asked, and Edmund nodded.

“[Bird’s Eye For An Eye]. I keep it on low most of the time, but I can set it to burn the eye out of whoever tries to [Inspect] me,” Edmund said.

“You said you got a unique class too?” Sylver asked.

“Yeah, I did,” Edmund answered.

They flew through the air, leaving behind a thin streak of gold against the blue sky, and white clouds.

“What is it?” Sylver asked.

“Promise not to laugh,” Edmund said, barely loud enough for Sylver to hear him over the sound of roaring flames.

“You know I can’t promise that,” Sylver answered.

Ed rolled his eyes, and for a few seconds, debated whether or not to tell Sylver the name of his class.

“Can you promise to not make any jokes about it until we’ve arrived, so I’m not tempted to drop you?” Edmund asked.

How bad of a class can it be?

“Sure,” Sylver said.

“Look at my status again,” Edmund shouted, as he moved away from Sylver, so he wouldn’t hear him laugh.

[Human* – Fire Bird (Unique) + Royal Flame (Legendary) + Day Blade (Rare) – 261]
[HP: 85,500 – 100%]
[MP: 90,753 – 91%]
[Stamina: 100,322 – 100%]
[Corpse – Unique]
[Soul – Unique]

“Holy shit…” Sylver said under his breath, but somehow, his words still reached Edmund’s ears.

[A skill similar to [Appraisal] has been used!]

“Wait, what? Why is your HP and Stamina so low? How is your mana only at 19 thousand?” Edmund shouted, in a voice that made it sound as if he was offended.

“I don’t know!” Sylver shouted back and only now saw what Edmund’s unique class was.

It would have been funnier if he hadn’t been blown away by the sheer size of his HP, MP, and Stamina.

“What have you been fighting?” Edmund asked.

“For the most part humans!” Sylver answered.

“Why?”

“Because I needed their corpses! And I was too busy gathering resources to find you to go on a proper monster hunt!” Sylver shouted back.

Edmund’s face didn’t change, but Sylver could tell he struck a nerve.

“I know you can’t use enchantments, but I know a couple of ways to increase your… everything,” Edmund answered back, with an almost protective tone in his voice.

“I’m looking forward to it!” Sylver shouted back, as all of a sudden, Arda came into view.

***

Sylver almost flinched with each step Edmund took because he plain and simple forgot how loudly the man walked.

Or “boy,” in this case, since Edmund looked like he was 14 years old, 15 at most.

“Lola Aeyri…” Edmund repeated as the gravel crunched underneath his barely covered feet.

“I’ll tell you the full story after we’ve had some time to rest. I helped free her from a prison of sorts, then made her open a company, then abandoned her for 5 years, and now she all but owns Arda, and its surrounding territories,” Sylver explained.

Edmund was making a face. He’d been making it since the moment Sylver mentioned Lola.

“You found her by accident, you said. The king of cats asked you for help?” Edmund asked.

Sylver nodded.

“You don’t remember her either, do you? The thing is, she wasn’t lying. I had a firm grip on her soul for almost a month, and she told me repeatedly that she was Layla’s daughter. If she was lying, I would have known it,” Sylver said, but Edmund kept making that face.

“I don’t know how to say this politely, but Layla never had a daughter,” Edmund said.

“Whoever she is, I trust her,” Sylver countered.

If he were talking to anyone else, the conversation would have ended here.

“See the thing is… Lola died,” Edmund said, with a mixture of inarguable confidence, and equal parts confusion.

“About 300 years before we did, yes,” Sylver said.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

“When you went to Layla to retrieve Oska’s staff, above the fireplace, did you see a pot of white sand, with a piece of dried bark stuck in it?” Edmund asked.

“I know what a burial gierth is… I think I saw one, yes…” Sylver said.

“That was for Lola. Adema sent me to help Layla, but by the time I got there, there was nothing to be done,” Edmund explained, and with every word, Sylver’s image of the burial gierth became clearer and clearer.

Lola’s name would have been carved on the piece of bark sticking out of the sand, but Sylver was in a rush back then, and for the unlife of him couldn’t remember if he had seen the name on the bark. Either way, the gierth wasn’t for an adult, an adult would get a twig, children got bark.

And the Lola Sylver knew might not be an elder, but she was very much an adult.

Sylver reached towards the bone where he kept his various IDs, and discovered that that particular bone was empty, on account of having been disintegrated.

“Getting in is going to be a bit of a hassle… Then there’s the fact that we’re coming from Krist-controlled territory. I can crack my skull open to show them there’s nothing,” Sylver said, as Edmund ran his hand along the top of his head.

“I would prefer not to,” Edmund said.

Sylver knew the reason.

It would hurt. And for all his toughness, Edmund wasn’t fond of pain. Especially pain that could be avoided.

“I’ll figure something out then, don’t worry about it,” Sylver said.

Smuggle him inside through Ron, and when we come back next time, make certain we’re coming from the North, not the south.

“After we rest, what’s our next move?” Edmund asked.

Sylver shrugged his shoulders.

“Celebrate so hard we need another rest,” Sylver said and grinned as Edmund chuckled.

“Good enough for me,” Edmund said, as Sylver wrapped his arm around his young companion as they continued walking towards Arda’s gates.

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