Divine Apostasy Book 12 - Chapter 32

Chapter 32

Ruwen heard the clicking noise first as he strode through the jungle. The emotions from this last leprechaun had been difficult to isolate. He couldn’t really tell what the emotion was, but it didn’t feel like greed.

The jungle canopy thickened overhead, blocking the sunlight and creating patches of darkness. Again, the faint sound of rhythmic clicking reached him.

The sound led Ruwen to another massive ceiba tree. It’s umbrella like crown starved the ground of light and the undergrowth thinned. The clicking grew louder, and he found the last leprechaun sitting in the foliage eighty feet above, his bone needles striking the magical loom that floated under his hands.

The scout’s fingers moved with blinding speed, weaving threads of gold and silver. He didn’t look away from his work when Ruwen appeared. This loom-wielding leprechaun would be the most dangerous of the five because Ruwen didn’t know what to expect.

This leprechaun had hidden its emotions and successfully cloaked its treasure as well. Without the emotion Ruwen’s Sacral chakra couldn’t help him pinpoint or see the treasure. The entire area around the scout seemed muted.

Ruwen extended his Divine and Mental Domains outward to detect any traps but found nothing. As he neared the tree, he detected a distortion in the air, like heat waves rising from hot sand. Against the trunk sat a simple wooden chest.

Studying the chest with Harmony revealed nothing unusual. Using his Sacral chakra the distortion wavered slightly, and for a moment, he glimpsed silver threads stretching from the chest into the surrounding trees, barely visible even with his enhanced senses.

The loom-wielding leprechaun studied Ruwen, its little hands working rapidly. The bone needles of its floating loom moved with unnerving precision, knitting air into something tangible.

Ruwen considered his options. The previous leprechauns had exploded when their treasures were destroyed, but this one seemed more cunning. It hadn't rushed to defend its hoard but waited patiently for Ruwen to approach. He now doubted the treasure was nearby.

The leprechaun's hands paused mid-weave. It cocked its head, studying Ruwen with emerald eyes that contained too much cunning for comfort.

"Pumpkin Spice," the scout said, its voice thoughtful. "Destroyer of dreams."

Ruwen frowned at the use of his new title and the accusation that followed.

“I can understand you,” Ruwen said, not hiding his surprise.

“I escaped the Great Fading long ago, and the languages in this Realm are primitive.”

The leprechaun stepped off the tree and into the air. He didn’t fall, though, and the bone needles clacked together again. The sound patterns bothered Ruwen. He didn’t know enough about using a loom to know if the sound was normal or if it held a hidden structure.

Ruwen’s instincts warned him something was wrong. The bone needles created something between tones and rhythms. Not a melody but not just beats. These sounds didn't fit into the familiar scales he knew. They existed between notes, in the spaces his Harmony ignored.

The sounds wove together, creating a jarring effect that made Ruwen's teeth ache. Unlike the chaotic noise he'd heard initially, he now glimpsed a structure and intent, but it remained cloaked in a musical language he couldn't interpret.

"You break what isn't yours," the leprechaun said. "You shatter what we spent millennia building."

Ruwen's Mental Domain detected a change in the surroundings. The threads he'd glimpsed earlier responded to the clicking and tightened. The entire area, including the tree, folded inward toward the chest.

Harmonic anchors sprung outward from Ruwen to keep him locked in this dimension, and shield kept any surprises from reaching him. He couldn’t tell yet if this was an illusion or if the leprechaun was actually folding space. The strange cadence from the loom slid past his harmonies like water off oiled leather.

Ruwen unleashed his level four Soul, the power vaporizing everything in a two-hundred-foot area, but still the disjointed clacking continued.

The Soul power passed around or possibly through the leprechaun, leaving him unharmed. The bone needles now created visible patterns in the air—sigils that reminded Ruwen of the Creation Realm runes he'd seen on the tablet through the rift.

The surroundings continued to collapse toward the chest, now only ten feet away. The unpleasant rhythm intensified, penetrating Ruwen's Harmonic defenses. Pain lanced across his skin, as if the leprechaun threaded the sounds through Ruwen’s flesh.

Ruwen tried to Blink away, but the space around him had become sticky and resistant. How had the leprechaun made the air so dense? Ruwen flooded his Mental Domain with Willpower trying to create a buffer between himself and the invasive tones, but it had no effect. His Architect Role also failed, even on the surroundings.

Ruwen considered activating the recall on his Ink Lord’s Wrap or creating a gate rune door in front of himself, but this unfamiliar harmonic construction captured his attention. If all else failed, he could assume his Destruction Realm form or purge Void energy from his body. Both of those would create other problems, however, and he wanted to get on with his gem hunting not to deal with a catastrophe he caused.

“What magic is this?” Ruwen asked, truly curious.

"You hear your expectations," the leprechaun taunted. "Creation doesn't follow your rules."

That response wasn’t very helpful, so Ruwen tried to prod the leprechaun into revealing more information. He recalled an old conversation between Rami and Xavier, and Ruwen used Xavier’s argument. "Music is math, and math is universal."

The leprechaun laughed, the sound like coins falling on a metal plate. "Tell me then oh great mathematician, the equation for despair, the algorithm for love, or the formula for fate."

The scout had either accidentally, or possibly on purpose, yanked Ruwen’s greatest Harmonic weakness into the light. Concepts like the leprechaun described had just barely surfaced now due to Ruwen’s Activated Sacral chakra. He glimpsed the hints of these concepts in the surrounding harmonies, but he had no idea how to explain them with math.

The loom's needles clicked faster, and Ruwen struggled to find structure in the jarring rhythm. He couldn’t see the harmonies the leprechaun created, and Ruwen wondered if his Third Eye chakra might help. Maybe he needed to skip the Heart and Throat chakras and do the Third Eye first.

Ruwen knew the leprechaun’s tune wasn't random noise. That meant it must originate from a completely different musical system. He compared it with Harmony hoping it might reveal a similarity that would provide insight. Harmony used twelve notes per octave with most compositions spanning eight octaves—

An explosion of ideas sidetracked Ruwen’s train of thought. The current situation with this odd music needed his full attention though, so he set them aside until after the fight.

Ruwen ignored the increasing pressure the leprechaun’s music applied to his body. He didn’t believe the magic could overcome his Demigod Fortification and with the addition of the five Hardening sigils on his Destruction Realm Meridians, he wasn’t sure anything could truly destroy his whole body anymore.

The longer Ruwen listened the more structure he discovered. The leprechaun’s music used twenty-two microtones, with complex quarter-tone ratios between them.

To Ruwen’s surprise his Sacral chakra pulsed with the rhythm and an idea occurred to him on how he could alter this music to something more familiar while leaving most of its structure intact. It was the first time he’d actively experienced the Sacral chakra’s creativity boost and it made him happy.

The leprechaun’s smug assurance had turned into a frown as his magic didn’t crush Ruwen.

"I’ve never heard microtonal scales used like that," Ruwen said.

The runes on the scout’s skin grew brighter, the green light creating shadows.

Hey, Lir. This leprechaun isn’t very helpful. Is this type of music common here?

Ancient Arabic and Indian music contain a similar structure. Those are areas on the other side of this planet.

Thanks, Lir. Can you create a library of music from this place. I didn’t expect to find Creation Realm harmonies here.

Of course.

Ruwen prodded the grumpy leprechaun. "I see you copied old Arabic and Indian tunes."

The leprechaun hissed, the bone needles increased their pace, and the magic redoubled its effort to squeeze Ruwen into a paste.

Ruwen absorbed the music into his newly Activated Sacral chakra until he felt how the notes connected and complemented each other. He’d never considered such a composition before, and his Sacral chakra alternated between hot and cold. For the first time, he understood how the rigid framework of how he utilized Harmony had limited his understanding of sound.

The dissonance disappeared, resolving into comprehensible patterns. What had sounded like random noise now revealed a different kind of order. The leprechaun's music created a web that manipulated space itself, bending reality in ways that Ruwen's rigid Harmony couldn't achieve.

Ruwen whistled a quick series of notes he thought complemented the Bad Alchemy song, Revival, from back home.

The leprechaun, tree, and everything to the horizon smashed into the ground in a three-foot wide perfectly straight line.

“Oops,” Ruwen whispered.