Divine Apostasy Book 7 - Chapter 60

Chapter 60

Ruwen floated in darkness, and it reminded him of the no gravity blackness he’d experienced on the other side of the Universe. Panic gripped him and he focused on his heart rate, preparing to slow it, and realized he couldn’t hear anything. Nothing but total silence. He raised a hand to touch his face, to feel something, but nothing happened, and he didn’t know if it was because he couldn’t move here or if he had no body.

What kind of trial was this?

Ruwen willed himself to the Citadel in his mind’s fortress, but he remained in the darkness.

Sivart? Ruwen asked, but no response came.

Ruwen couldn’t move and didn’t have anyone to talk with. The only thing he seemed capable of was thinking, so that’s what he did.

Anything relating to the Steps, Ruwen revisited, except for his time with Rami, and the early days of training with Sift, which had little philosophy and a lot of physical pain. He found two references to his internal state seemed relevant.

Mist had told Ruwen “Silence and darkness fill you.” At the time, he’d thought they were two different things, but knowing souls gave off light and also had sound, she probably meant the same thing. Uru had trapped his soul behind an impenetrable curtain, and Mist thought that would present a problem.

Just a moment ago, Thorn had also referenced the darkness of Ruwen’s soul, and described how his burdens would make this trial impossible to finish. She’d said, “The scope of his burdens and darkness of his soul are both so profound, it is incomprehensible.”

Burdens, weight, and darkness came up over and over. Thorn had referenced Ruwen’s struggles on Mount Sorrow, and he remembered clearly the effort it took to drag himself to the summit.

Mount Sorrow wasn’t the only reference to burdens, though. It had come up recently when Thorn had gotten upset by Ruwen’s teaching methods. When he’d justified his behavior as a way to protect the class, both Mist and Thorn had responded.

Mist had said, “Responsibility for others is a heavy burden.”

And Thorn had immediately followed with, “A burden that is crushing you,” and finally, something Ruwen still didn’t understand, Thorn had whispered, “You are deeply out of balance, Adept.”

How could protecting people be a burden? And how could that affect his balance? What balance had Thorn referenced?

None of the burden talk made sense to Ruwen, so he turned his attention to the darkness issue. Darkness seemed to be the second reason Mist and Thorn thought he would fail, since they always spoke in the context of darkness and not music. He assumed that would be the issue.

When the other Adepts stepped through the doorway, did their souls light this space? Did it make the point of the trial clear? Dusk’s last comment to him had been, “may the shadow guide you.”

Did Dusk mean an actual shadow? If she did, then that confirmed Ruwen needed light here. Probably from his imprisoned soul. Which brought him back to a problem he’d struggled with before arriving here. How to free his soul.

Except it had become complicated as Uruziel, the Divine fragment of Uru Ruwen had saved, had told him this about his soul prison, “the moment you create a passage through those protections, you will appear, like a mountain in a world full of sand. It will be impossible to hide, and all the deities will come. Some to see an Axiom, some to kill him, maybe even some to follow him.”

And while Ruwen had spent over a year trying to figure out a method to do just that, he now worried he might do it by accident. Especially since Malth, when sometime around the library incident where Rami had triggered the Literary Aneurism trap, he’d damaged the shell surrounding his soul.

Ruwen wondered how much time had passed here. It felt like he’d been floating and thinking for days. Thorn had pleaded with him not to attempt the seventh trial, but he’d ignored her, and now he might spend eternity regretting that decision.

But Dusk had felt Ruwen had a chance. She had mentioned the shadow, which meant she must think he could create one. Did she think he knew the process to break the soul prison? She wouldn’t know he couldn’t do that, for fear of summoning all the gods. Despair filled his thoughts as he realized the hope Dusk had held for him, would, if he succeeded, likely kill them all.

Ruwen floated in misery for a minute or a day or a month. He couldn’t tell. Eventually, he grew sick of the feeling and turned his attention to why Dusk thought he knew how to break the soul prison.

Rami had absorbed all of Ruwen’s memories, including his time at the first Bamboo Viper test. When Dusk had spoken to him about his soul at the top of Mount Sorrow, Rami believed the Founder had emphasized the words “thinkers like us” when she’d said this about her sisters: “Neither one is great at seeing the hidden. They aren’t thinkers like us. You have already discovered some Shadow Steps, so finding your soul might be possible.”

Ruwen had already gone over all this while floating in a Shed across the universe. He had concluded the only thing Dusk’s comments and the Literary Aneurism that damaged his soul prison had in common was his mind. Which didn’t help him at all.

Did Ruwen know anything now that he didn’t know then? Some way to look at the problem with more information. Dusk had visibly reacted when Ruwen had told her the most important step was toward enlightenment. Why had that made her so happy?

Enlightenment. It had light in the name, which Ruwen could really use, but it was the wrong type of light. Enlightenment, as he understood it, related to taking knowledge and creating an understanding from it. Something more than just the raw facts knowledge provided.

The Literary Aneurism had shoved a massive amount of knowledge into Ruwen’s mind, even if it had arrived shredded in raw components. He hated himself for the analogy, but if his mind acted like an oven, and enlightenment formed a pastry, then the Literary Aneurism provided a massive amount of raw ingredients.

The Narrators had organized those ingredients and created an entire world with them inside Ruwen’s mind. If this line of thought was right, then the Literary Aneurism had created the damage to his soul prison.

But why hadn’t the world the Narrators created in Ruwen’s mind continued to damage the shell around his soul? He thought about that for a while and concluded the Narrators had mostly just arranged what already existed in his mind.

To stay with the baking analogy, the Narrators had organized the ingredients into piles, and created some dough, but they hadn’t baked many of their own pastries yet. That process had begun as the Narrators created their own knowledge, but compared to what already existed in his mind, they hadn’t changed the total volume much.

Ruwen’s thoughts pulsed with excitement, as this line of thinking felt right. It meant that as the Narrators matured and created more original knowledge, it would affect the soul prison, just as absorbing another Literary Aneurism would.

Joy filled Ruwen’s mind. He had, after all this time, finally figured out the likely process for destroying his soul’s prison.

Although it didn’t help right now, Ruwen celebrated the victory anyway. And once again, the insight gained from his Bamboo Viper Step journey had provided the clues. The layers of complexity the Step Clan philosophy contained staggered him. It had led to the balance of his physical body, and now a breakthrough in the internal state of his mind and soul.

Ruwen’s thoughts stopped as a sudden realization shocked him senseless.

Balance.

If the previous six trials focused on perfecting the external balance of Ruwen’s body, it only made sense that the seventh focused on balance as well. A balance he had not considered until this very moment.

The seventh trial taught the importance of internal balance.