Amdirlain's PoV - Ijmti - The Cloister of the Fallen

The lifetimes she influenced loomed like an avalanche poised to crush her. Amdirlain sought her soulscape, but the plinth yanked her back into the moment. From within the plinth, billions of tales linked to her were assembled, the bleakest themes stabbing into the forefront of her thoughts.

It tallies my failures first.

The male's terror overcame her. Desperate for his family, the Matriarch's goons had snatched him off the streets for buying rations from a black market dealer. The last thing he'd seen before a painful blow had knocked him out was the food for his cubs being crushed underfoot. Revived with the Matriarch looming over him, he'd started to beg for forgiveness until he'd seen the mound of merged corpses slithering behind her. Pinned down on that lab table, the Matriarch ranted coldly about lessons to be taught, and pinpricks of red showed in her pupils.

A sharper spike of fear ripped through him, then her clean blade came down, and spells yanked his Soul from his flesh and wove into the construct that absorbed his body. The plinth provided the knowledge that the Matriarch's actions had been a response to Am's mocking songs. She sought refuge in Zen Meditation and the melding of her past lives; however, the plinth restricted her to the singular perspective of the person experiencing that moment. Through more blades and spells, Amdirlain experienced being tortured and slain by the Matriarch thousands of times. With nothing she could do to change their current fates, Amdirlain mourned for them and caught at their names.

I will survive. If you're still trapped, I'll free you.

With the next life, she found herself a helpless observer in a child's body. Beside her bed was an adult Catfolk with silvery fur, wearing the law keeper's light blue uniform leathers. Curtains enclosed the area around the medical ward bed, and from beyond came the murmurs of Catfolk talking to other officers.

"Do you know your name?"

Whiskers drooping, her head jumped back and forth. "No."

The word came out with a soft lisp, and the scent of the officer's disbelief twisted knots of fear in her stomach. As bile rose in the back of her throat, her stomach betrayed her with a rumbling groan.

"What is the last thing you remember before you woke up here?"

"I went to bed." Her gaze flickered to her hand above the sheet, and she saw the patterns of black across her grey fur. The scent of her mother rose in her thoughts, and worry churned in her guts, ears drooped, and eyes prickled with tears. "Where's my ma?"

She's a doctor who I age-reversed because of Eldritch corruption.

A curtain shifted to reveal two doctors in the passage down the ward's middle. "Law keeper, there is no point talking to her. We've already confirmed her identity with relatives, and she remembers nothing of her life. Please come with us, as you're disturbing other patients."

"What happened to the isolation pending questioning?"

"She has a pride member among the staff."

The child looked hopefully between them, and her ears twitched upwards. "My pride are here?"

"I'll go see." The officer signalled her to calm down. "You'll stay here and be quiet like a good cub?"

"Yes."

Unsure where her ma could be, she followed the law keeper's instruction and tried to find a comfortable spot.

He stepped out into the corridor, closing the curtain. "Let me talk to her relative."

As their soft footsteps reached the door, the positive pressure of the quarantine containment gusted whispered words to her ears. "This whole thing stinks of a God, so they requested reassignment away from her."

She'd only just settled when she caught the doctor's whispered response; she mewed and slowly curled up in a miserable ball, holding onto her tears. Months and years of uncertainty followed before her release from the hospital. Yet she didn't get to go home, and every pride house she entered soon stank of nervous tension instead of welcome and care. Everywhere she went, the whispers followed, and her closest kin avoided her. She was bounced between apartments and then to distant cities, looked after by whoever in the pride begrudgingly had space.

After fifteen years of feeling like an outcast, she took her own life. It then jumped to her original loved ones and showed their damaged lives and the pain from the absence of their mother. Scores of Catfolk whom she had sought to give a second chance ended up taking their lives. The creatures from the Far Chaos were beyond the plinth's ability to judge, so instead, it considered the age reversals to be without reason.

When those lives had run their course, it moved on to the next serving of judgement—the trials. The population of Qil Tris had grown in the years since she'd left, as they no longer had to worry about the Gods' Graves and the undead menace. Yet Amdirlain had constructed the trials, and the plinth held her entirely responsible. Once the trials were spread around the planet, millions of adventurers delved into them daily. Though initially low, the death toll increased until sometimes the daily tally totalled thousands of adventurers. Some resulted from pushing their luck and misjudging their team's capabilities, but others came from contributing to greater events during zone surges. She suffered through their deaths and the worsened lives of the loved ones they left behind. To Amdirlain, the worst were the young lives lost on their first delve, but none were easy. The plinth brutally shared the emotional devastation that each death caused families and friends.

Despite her Willpower and having experienced multiple deaths from past lives, her fingers gained a white knuckled grip on the plinth as despair ground brutally deeper. The millionth death had her on her knees, and by twelve million, she was curled around the crystal post, tears staining her face; the weight of countless lives marred or ruined by the trials of her devising crushed her.

Overall, it judged her guilty of negatively affecting thirty-six million lives to a greater or lesser extent and made her live through the outcomes.

Frost giants, dragons, and other vanquished foes got their turn, showing what her actions had wrought. Though she had minimal mercy for cutting short their cruelty, their alien perspective was brutally carved into her.

Amdirlain had drawn in on herself so much that she missed the shift in music. After the death of the priests of disease, only a few individuals experienced negative impacts. Unlike her guards and the malicious town guard, all of whose lives she'd worsened, Lady Dor Ji didn't come up.

By the time the last lifetime crashed through her, Amdirlain was reeling from a broken sense of time and perspective.

With a hiccup, it resumed where the plinth had left off at the end of her first visit. There were still people alive among those she'd helped during her first visit to Vehtë, so it continued the achievements and triumphs they'd since experienced and helped others accomplish. The events should have uplifted Amdirlain, yet after everything she'd endured, they just put more strain on her exhausted mind, and her successes overwhelmed and drowned her. Once the plinth had recounted the deeds performed by the former slaves and founders of her orders on Vehtë, it moved on to other worlds.

It rolled through villages upon the worlds blighted by eruptions and other natural disasters whose duration she'd shortened or snuffed out completely. She'd saved hundreds of thousands from starvation and disease. Before it progressed through her training tower in Xaos, where deities had routed countless troops through the town to strengthen them. The better lives of the Mousekin in the burrow she'd created were hailstones of information. She was mentally drunk and exhausted long before the plinth shared all the lives enriched by removing the looming threat of the Gods' graves. For every Adventurer who died inside the trials, thousands earned a living and grew stronger. The trials fulfilled the Catfolk's combative instincts in a fashion that city life couldn't manage. While those skilled or daring enough rose to a level of success that changed the lives of their prides in one fell swoop.

She witnessed the quality of life for the Kobold tribe improved, the Lizardfolk society brought back from the brink of destruction, and the Gorgon sisters' reunion. The destruction of the Gate to Di Yu in the frozen north netted her credit for millions of lives saved. The thousands she'd trained in Universal Life at the West Wind's court sent out even bigger shockwaves of change as those she'd taught improved people's daily lives. There, Dor Ji's life emerged, having found the recognition and support she'd craved in the aftermath of the Di Yu Gate's destruction. The restoration of the ley lines prevented bigger invasions from striking at the West Wind's and South Wind's courts.

A full review of the lives started through Atonement souls showed that even the worst fates were preferable to damnation. Throughout the billions of years in other people's shoes, Amdirlain desperately clung to her sense of self.

After a seeming eternity of silence, the plinth pulsed again, and a rippling note ran through Amdirlain's flesh. She read its intention to shed the Fallen species from Celestial Essence, yet the effect was dangerously different for her. The notes caused her Soul and the material of Sun Wukong's headband to manifest as a small sphere inside her body, twelve centimetres in diameter, in place of her heart. They then pressed her spiritual net inwards through her flesh until it was a tight mesh over the sphere's rippling surface. The effect distorted her sigil, but the conduits ran directly from its key nodes through tunnels in the Primordial material to her Soul. Ridgelines built up around the network as the blind pressure forced it towards the 'essence' at her core. The ongoing themes pushed through her flesh, crushing the experience from her classes and the energy of her core abilities down through the conduits that linked each node to her Soul. Yet the tension across her spiritual net increased when the material didn't let the strands of the net through.

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Unable to interrupt the shifting melodies, she acted before her sigil ruptured. Used to Protean's formless existence, Amdirlain focused on the sigil's central node and released a melody to lengthen the conduits between the other nodes and her Soul. She folded the sigil into a pillar as her flesh transformed. The plinth forced it through the conduit path, still held open by the central node. It felt like a bird diving for a fish deep underwater. As the sigil's nodes touched directly against her Soul their conduits dissolved. When the last touched down, the sigil bloomed from a two-dimensional form into a proper Phoenix, diving deeper into her soul. No longer drip-fed through thin paths, the power surged through the reinforced connections she forged between nodes.

With the tunnels through the material no longer filled by the conduits, the light from her Soul shone outwards. As the paths constricted, they caused the light to gain a focused intensity that burst through failing flesh. Before the last strands of the spiritual net pulled away from her body, Amdirlain managed a desperate song composed years before. The backlash broke the remaining connections between spirit and flesh, turning her Fallen form into a dried husk. Now completely unbound by her physical form, Ki, Psi, and Mana reserves exploded across the crystal dome. Golden light cut through the shadows under the platform, free from her body's constraints. As the remains of her spiritual net tore further, the needles of light intensified and breached the darkness below.

The platform bucked and leapt, as the decayed remnants of long-dead dark deities dissolved and peeled away from the energy they'd camouflaged. From the depths of the pit, a golden pillar speared upwards and smashed Amdirlain's fractured body against the roof. The force melted the interior layers, the liquified crystal sealing the entrance. The pressure scoured away at the frayed spiritual net and fought to pierce her Soul, only for the material of Sun Wukong's headband to blunt its assault. With it tightly constricted around her Soul the material had no give and deflected the onslaught of foreign Primordial energy. Constrained within the crystal dome formed by Orhêthurin around the chamber, it had no place to escape and reflected back across her, tearing at the tattered remains of her spiritual net.

The Soul that had once been a part of it drew the ancient energy inwards through the closing channels. Already battered and aware of the approaching notes, Amdirlain pulled into a defensive position and stood her ground within her soulscape. Despite its mindless pushing and shoving, the energy was overwhelming. Each time it forced her from a tunnel's entrance, wisps ripped through her Soul before the liquid metal closed the conduit. With each closure, the pressure from without mounted, the heat with her soulscape climbed, and scars cracked open and bled lifetimes into each other.

I'm not sure I can keep the energy from consuming me, but will the headband's material trap me forever if it seals over me?

As she was repeatedly driven back from the tunnels, the sphere sealed over until it was nearly a full enclosure, and despite her determination, she continued to struggle and slip. With the last tunnel at risk, Amdirlain tried to force beyond the material boundary, only to be blasted back. Mentally exhausted from the plinth, her defences wavered yet again. Driven back, a wisp of energy made it inside, cutting open fresh wounds as it clawed desperately at her. Before she could slip around it, the conduit closed. Across the sphere's exterior, the liquified material roiled and churned, but the lack of focused intent kept it from immediately failing under the assault.

Trapped within the globe of Primordial material, Amdirlain clung desperately to her fragile sense of self. Without flesh to channel True Song, her greatest option was out of reach, as its use would further damage her Soul. She could hear the released energy, the sealed dome glowing a brilliant gold, and beyond it, the enduring vigil of the Eldest.

How do I get out of this sphere now? I lack the Mana to form spells, and I've no Psi reserves to empower any techniques. Mana Font has no exit to flesh, so it produces nothing. My Sigil is intact, but can I even cycle? I'm not sure how I'm even thinking.

She tried to reach anyone's thoughts, but the dome blunted her reach. As the wisp of power raked more scars open, it burrowed inside the material of her Soul, driving for her sigil that had flown for her Soul's depth.

Was it all for nothing?

In desperation, Amdirlain activated Enervating Aura and expanded it to the limits of the dome. Though it futilely struggled against the external energy, the unsupported wisps within the sphere reacted against the Power, opening more wounds as they battled against its grip. She focused the last fragments of her attention on them, grasping at the vaporous presences, utilising lessons she'd once used to direct Ki mists. Lessons that ran back to feeding Ki through a Soul Link to purify Livia's Soul. As the wisps ceased moving, the music within them stopped, and in a rush of dissolution, fed Amdirlain a sharp surge of energy that shattered her struggling consciousness. The surrounding sphere, battered by the ancient energy and gnawed on by Amdirlain's Enervating Aura, allowed fresh wisps of energy to leak through transit cracks.

Unsupported, they also fed Amdirlain strength through her aura, but then the dam broke.

Eldest's PoV - Ijmti - The Cloister of the Fallen

Her words echoed in Eldest's mind as yet another centenary of her entering the dome passed.

I don't know how long my assessment will take.

The serene, white-haired elven male sitting cross-legged in mid-air beside them as he had since his arrival to slay their former master's Avatar and lift the last of the siege. He frowned as the plinth blazed with golden light—a piercing note cut through the still air, echoing up the shaft. The glow turned into a blazing fire tainted with a swirling black mist.

Straightening, they waved a tubular tool arm at the dome. "Do you know what that is?"

"Orhêthurin hid her Power here all along," whispered Eleftherios. "It makes sense. She wanted it to die, so she hid in it among the divine deaths she caused. Was she hoping it would decay untouched, or was it feeding your wards?"

"Hid what Power?"

Eleftherios's gaze widened, and he glanced at Eldest. "Flee."

The word echoed through the chamber and up the shaft. Dread sent the Fallen fleeing across the planes, yet Eldest stood their ground and saw the dome that had stood for aeons shatter like a hard-boiled egg.

Perched atop a metre and a half tall plinth of clear crystal, stood a two metre tall Phoenix whose outstretched wings had shattered the crystal shell. Blazing gold feathers shed flames of Primordial and Destruction Mana that matched its heterochromatic eyes. Its beak snapped with mindless fury, and the golden feathers flared brighter as its gaze fixed on the pair. As the flames grew brighter, the beast threw back its head and screeched. A cone of churning air leapt upwards and disintegrated everything in its path, ripping its way to the surface. Nestled among the feathers, he saw a clear pendant at the Phoenix's throat.

Eleftherios grasped Eldest's hindmost leg before either the Eldest or the Phoenix could act further and flung the Fallen into the Chaos between planes. Eldest saw Eleftherios leap for the shaft toward the surface, with the Phoenix in pursuit before the unstable rift sealed.

Their pendant buzzed as hundreds enquired about their safety.

Eldest summarised what happened without Eleftherios's revelations about hidden power, before they ended with what they felt were the important points. "The dome in the cavern shattered, but the platform and the pillar over the pit still stand. I'll need volunteers to return to Ijmti to see if Redemption's Path can assess anyone's worthiness."

"And if it doesn't?"

Silpar beat him to replying. "Then we remain in the Abyss and try to improve the lives of mortals to make up for our past failures."

"They warned us she would destroy it."

Though it was tempting to respond pointedly to the disappointment, Eldest addressed what the accuser should have focused on. "She endured assessment for seven hundred years, whereas the longest before her has taken a few hours. Her pendant was clear. How many lives must she have improved for the assessment to go on for so long?"

"Over a billion mortals live on Qil Tris, where we cleared up the Gods' Grave. Sarah said Am had set up something there to help them all," offered Silpar through the pendant.

"Now again, do I have volunteers?" questioned Eldest.

"Might I come along? I've been waiting to be assessed."

Others spoke up, and Eldest picked the first five as companions for the trip.

They waited ten days before they ventured to Ijmti. Their arrival high in the mountains gave them a clear view of the valley. Where the cloister's fortification once stood was an open cone that resembled a volcano's maw. Beyond it, the forest and pools of corruption burned, a wildfire that raged from horizon to horizon. While their companions stood dumbfounded, Eldest took in the closest destruction and spotted clean sprouts that grew without a trace of the typical rot and decay that Ijmti featured.

Together, the group flew to the entrance and descended. Destructive Mana had obliterated the upper pathways, but the wards and central shaft were undamaged. They quickly reached the plinth's chamber and found its floor pitted with scars from the Phoenix's flames. Around the chamber, the untouched murals still showed the cloister's history from when Orhêthurin created the path. Where the dome had stood, they could now see the exposed platform with no trace left of the darkness. There was a solid line of crystal from the pit's edge to a central disc from which a plinth extended. A gap between the disc and the pit's edge promised a dangerous drop, but a crystal latticework blocked it half a metre down.

I remember stories of Fallen saying they hung from the platform's edge, so there was no way it used to be there. She asked if I wanted her to add protection to stop someone slipping, and added it anyway when I said no.

"Who wishes to try first?"

A recent member from an elven pantheon stepped forward, his skin blackened and scaled, and the Eldest motioned him on. He stepped gingerly along the path, but it supported his weight without protest, and eventually rested his hand on the plinth. Curious, Eldest moved to where he could see the process. His gaze was vacant throughout, then his pendant glowed, changing from clear crystal to a light red shot through with black threads. As Eldest continued to watch, the threads faded slightly.

He blinked and looked at the group, his fingertips shook badly as they lifted to his pendant. "Your explanation said it didn't consider any good deeds until after the first assessment."

Eldest's tendril crest waved. "It doesn't."

"But it showed me what I had done right since my fall. It revealed the relief that souls I rescued from undead hosts felt, and that was before I even heard of Redemption's Path."

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