The Heart is a Void: Ashes to Ashes

The EXP from the minor dungeon was enough for Crucis to reach just over three-fourth of the way to level 58. He might manage to reach there by the end of today.

However, for the moment, DeathGang were resting in the empty area near the dungeon. Crucis drew out the book marked [A Charming Fairy Tale] from his inventory, and began to read, curious about why it dropped from the skeleton boss.

A Charming Fairy-Tale

Once upon a time, Alice was wandering in a large garden.

There were short trees filled with all sorts of flowers, as it was summer.

She walked over to pick a violet flower, which had a glowing white ring around its flamboyant petals.

However, as she stood on her toes and picked it, she felt the ground giving way beneath her.

Holding the flower, she dropped into a small tunnel, and then fell painfully through.

She found herself facing a large, white temple, with a fountain filled with violet petals. There was a shrine at the end of the room.

A handful of worshippers were gathered, difficult to see in the dark underground temple. They picked up Alice, and placed her on the shrine. Then they bowed to her and called her a God.

She had just reached adulthood, and was perpetually nervous about whether she would be respected. Flattered but confused, she asked them why they called her that. Instead of responding, they forcibly walked up to her and placed a blank, oval black mask over her face. She could not see.

They faced her and said one word, 'Dream.' Unable to find her way out with the mask on, she did as she was told.

She dreamed of being a rich princess, covered with gold and jewels. She clutched a garland of gold around her neck, and saw a ruby on its front. She smiled. It was good.

She was married to a prince with a stiff blue and white suit, keeping an upright posture. As he embraced her, she felt a wave of euphoria. However, she realised that this was because of the vertical lines of gold across his shirt, which pressed against her skin.

She began to clutch covetously at this, and the Prince embraced her more closely and kissed her. She helplessly fell into his arms, but he soon began to grasp her more tightly as a result. Feeling slightly claustrophobic in his strong grip, she tried to push him away. However, she found that she could not.

She tried to wrench her head away, but found that his head was now attached to hers, and both had melded together. She was clutching the gold on the Prince's suit, but found that it was now her suit as well. She tried to cry out in fear and confusion, but found that her mouth was now the Prince's.

"You wanted these jewels," he said, "Now they are yours. You wanted me, now I am yours."

"Let me go!" she cried weakly, from a corner of the Prince's mouth.

"It is not in my control. Through your childhood, your fantasies have been just fantasies - they turned out to just be you. Now you get to experience the truth of your fantasies - you turn out to be them. That is how we chase our dreams." The Prince spoke in a slightly strange tone, halfway between crazed and carefree.

"At least I am now a ruler. I have always wished for riches and admiration," she replied, finding the male voice odd.

"Yes, and riches don't care about your gender or name! Your dreams can be my dreams! Why does it matter which of us you are, if you get what you really wanted? Power, fame, wealth, I have it all!"

"What a charming offer! So I can have it?"

"Well... maybe. It depends on how you fit into my Kingdom!"

"What is your Kingdom called?" she asked excitedly.

"Hades. That is also my name," he said. "It is the kingdom of the dead."

As he said this, his body vanished, leaving an empty, black silhouette for Alice to inhabit. She noticed that her face now looked like the black mask which she had worn.

She tried to speak, but felt as if her voice dissolved away into this black void, and no sound emanated. Worriedly, she tore off the mask.

Having removed the mask, she saw the five worshippers still kneeling before her.

"What is a god?" she asked them curiously.

"God is God," they replied in unison.

They then began to speak in turn, from left to right.

"God is the all-powerful being."

"God is the being who owns all wealth, even the world itself."

"God is every virtue."

"God is greater than both male and female, in God both are united."

"God is the furthest reaches of imagination. I wish for God, and so he is there."

She wandered hazily up to the fountain, and saw that the worshippers were still bowing to the shrine as fervently as when she was there. However, their words had filled her with slight confidence.

Looking into the mirror, she saw with horror that she was still wearing the black mask. She tore it off hurriedly and threw it loudly to the ground, but as she looked down again she saw that a black mask still appeared over her face. She tore off mask after mask, but still the same blank, black mask hung onto her face.

"If you imagine God, then can he be anything you like?" she asked the worshippers. She wondered if a God could help her with this problem, which seemed to have no normal solution.

"No," said the leftmost worshipper. "God is what God is. All else changes, but God remains the same."

"You said I'm God. So then - can I do just anything? Can I be big and strong? Can I be charismatic?"

"God is charismatic, because God is already in the hearts of men and women," replied the worshipper. "Can you be strong? Of course, but you shall see."

As he finished speaking, Alice saw a shadowy figure loom behind her left shoulder. She saw that it was a black cat, which had taken a seat on the fountain. It had a sharp needle sticking into one of its paws. It yelped, as if asking for help.

She pulled the needle out of its paw, and saw that the needle glowed. She was going to throw it away, but found its allure irresistable. As if instructed by it, she stuck it firmly into one shoulder, forming a deep, bleeding cut. She began to cry from the pain and kneeled to the ground, but she felt stronger.

As her vision fogged over, she heard a strangely hypnotic voice coming from the direction where the cat had been sat. "Studied charisma is such a con, isn't it?" it said. "A man accepts that which is already in his heart, repeated to himself again. It is like a parasite on the body."

It continued. "Advertisement is like a bat swarm of cancerous tumours, swooping over the human soul. Oh, but I can't say that now, it's too poetic and old-fashioned."

"That's such a... grotesque image," she cried.

"So are you, my dear," the voice said with relish. "But perhaps you do not understand. Oh well, your sort never do."

Feeling more strength in her limbs, she easily hoisted herself up to an upright position, and tried to use her bulging arms to strike at the cat. However, it had already vanished by the time she stood up. As she lunged forwards, she instead fell into the fountain.

Pulling herself out, feeling dizzy, she looked at her reflection. She was surprised to see that her drenched body now looked like the Prince who she had dreamed about, except her arms were thicker and bulged against her shirt until it tore. She tried to move her arms down to push away from the fountain, but instead they moved upwards as if someone else was moving them.

Her face was still covered by a black mask.

"I wish I looked like I used to, when I came down here!" she cried.

"Didn't you always look like this?" said the rightmost worshipper.

"No! I was a normal girl!"

"Well, if you were a normal girl, we would have hardly thought that you were a God. You must have always been extraordinary, powerful, and superhuman. Indeed, there can be no doubt, you already looked the same as you do now."

"No! I'm Alice, I was a normal girl, not some freak like you! Where is this place?"

"It is the land where you dream," said the second-from-right worshipper.

"It is the place where you are nothing but dreams, and once you dream something it is true. Isn't that absurd? The less you think of the world, the more the world is what you think! The less you can do, the more you can dream! The less you are, the more you are! What could be more absurd?" the rightmost worshipper added.

"It is a consummation devoutly to be wished," said the central disciple, in a pained voice. "To be or not to be? That is not the question. To sleep, to dream - then you are not, and you therefore are."

The disciple to his left piped up. "To be is not to be! To not be is to be! Everything changes, everything is in flux, and at root there is only the idea - no, not an idea, but a dream! Our dreams fly out across the land of reality, and they colonise it to become reality. Dreams, dreams are our Kingdom. And why wait, why revolt, why make hopeful predictions, when what you want is already here and you just have to wish for more and more?"

"But why speak of being or non-being at all?" said the second-from-right worshipper. "God neither exists nor non-exists, at least not by our limited conceptions of existence and non-existence! Who can know what God does? God is all a mystery. Come, it is ridiculous to even speak of a God, we have no notions which could communicate about God, even that of 'God.'"

"But if I'm God, what am I supposed to do?" Alice cried out.

"Oh, who knows? Or maybe we can express that in the via negativa: I have absolutely no idea, miss. Or perhaps deontologically: I have absolutely no idea, and that proves clearly what you are to do."

"That doesn't help! I still don't know. All of my wishes just seemed to make things worse."

"Then don't make wishes. But don't you wish that you could be better again?"

"Oh, yes!"

"Well, then you must keep wishing. But I do not know for what. In fact, I don't even know if you should keep on wishing."

"Look, I never meant to get you guys into some deep philosophical argument! Can you just show me the way home?"

"Why would we listen to you?" said the central worshipper.

"You said I was God, so listen to me."

"You are God, so your home is in a Church or a nunnery. So go. You are more powerful than us," the worshipper replied. "'God doth not need either man's works or his own gifts.' We put our faith in God, but why should God need works when God is all-powerful? The point of works is to move A to B, if God wanted A to be at position B, I daresay he would have moved it there. Nay, go to a nunnery by yourself. I swear, ever since this fool became God, I have lost all hope in the world's order. I should gladly welcome the apocalypse."

On hearing this stance on faith and works, the rightmost worshipper angrily objected, and the two wrestled for a few moments before the central worshipper threw his foe to the ground, and resumed bowing to the shrine.

However, the leftmost worshipper got to his feet, and addressed Alice. "You wish to go home? Well, then I must take you home. Look, there is a tunnel upwards behind you."

Alice groped her way along the white walls of the temple, following the worshipper. Soon, she found her way to the tunnel which she had fallen down. She clambered with difficulty through it, but felt the sure hands of the worshipper guiding her through. Soon, she was relieved to breathe fresh air, and collapsed onto the garden grass.

She took a few seconds to collect her bearings, but was then surprised to find the worshipper who had helped her was also alongside her, and she wondered as to how he managed to climb through the tunnel in a matter of seconds.

"Alright, do you want me to point you home?" he said, in a low-pitched voice with a slight hiss. She noticed that his canine teeth grew longer as he spoke.

"Yes, please," she said, "I should very much like to know. I had quite forgotten, while I was down there!" She giggled slightly.

"There is your home." He pointed down towards the ground, and above where he pointed she could see a large gravestone. It seemed one or two days old.

"Welcome. I may only stay here for one minute, now I must go," said the worshipper, who by now had grown large fangs. He disappeared, and she saw a small bat flitting into the dark tunnel. She wondered at his eccentric response.

As Alice looked curiously at the gravestone, she saw that it had her name on it. After a few moments of staring, she vanished into thin air, and was never seen again.

The moral of the story is: rabbits reproduce at a rate which approximates the Fibonacci sequence. Q.E.D.

P.S. Oh, Lord, protect us from joy, for it makes us act like energetic rabbits, and we do not wish to be reduced to numbers. Save us, Oh Lord. Schoolchildren read mournful Hamlet's tragedy in English classes, but they will read our tragedies in mathematics classes. That is the real tragedy.

Crucis wasn't entirely sure about the story's professed moral, as it surely depended on which rabbits and how quickly they died off. However, the author's distress about the matter was touching.

Getting to his feet, Crucis dusted himself off and walked over to DicingDevil, Starfighter and Akshel, who were skimming through a book named [History of the Temple].

"Hi," DicingDevil said, "It turns out that there's some kind of story to this dungeon."

"I can guess," Crucis replied. "Fugitives from Ganféan's Kingdom came here to escape the disease and invasions which destroyed his Kingdom."

"Yes, actually. How did you know?"

"Oh, this. As you can tell from the name, it's great literature."

He presented [A Charming Fairy-Tale], then continued speaking.

"I found this book. It's about a female like the one in the poem from Ganféan's dungeon, except that this time she was dead all along. The enemies here all had names like [Defender of the Faith] and [Faithful], this seems to suggest that the Kingdom's superstitious magic - which ran on a sort of belief or 'faith' - kept on trying to persist in spite of death, just like the séance promised to revive the Queen's dead children and bring a prosperous future Kingdom as the real one crumbled.

"This temple seemed like a similar attempt to realise a sort of future for the Kingdom in spite of its demise. The people here were probably devotees of this magic, or reliant on it, since by Jack's account it had spread through the Kingdom and things like the Queen's mask were commonly worn."

"Alice, like the skeleton?" DicingDevil asked, as he and Starfighter scanned the book. "Or Alice in Wonderland, I guess. Or Alice in Chains."

"All of those, in some way," Crucis laughed. "It seems to explain why the skeleton named 'Alice' was seemingly masculine and bulky, despite the name. She merges with the Prince, then takes some sort of drug that makes her muscular but feels like someone else is controlling her body. This Alice resembles what we know of the Queen, and is even shown marrying a Prince, though she seems to almost lose her sense of identity in the process. It seems to be about the court, and how the Queen's 'dreams' continue to distort the world after the Kingdom's death."

"Yes," Starfighter said. "There are many stories like this told in the upper villages, a lot of them are based on the area's history. I think that the word 'dream' here isn't exactly the same as in English, which is why she can be commanded to dream easily. In the native language, there's a word - 'bidanbalet' - which is translated as 'dream,' but typically means something like 'dream-like trance,' or 'engrossing daydream.' It basically means that a person goes slightly faint while caught up in the appeal of daydreaming."

"So with the mask on, she gets caught up in a daydream? But she was dead the whole time, so it was a bit like a dream in the 'sleep of death.'" Crucis said.

"Yes. The word 'bidanbalet' is sometimes also used to suggest the foiled ambitions and hopes of dead people. There was a text named 'Gilgeh,' where a hero is shocked by visiting his friend's grave and contemplating the friend's 'bidanbalet.' However, he calms down and resolves that, 'Ambition is never sated in life, it only lends a pained air to the grave.' He begins to take on humbler tasks, assisting local peasants with everyday problems rather than joining the King's wars."

"Do you know the native language well?"

"I am somewhat familiar with it, I had to read some of it to figure out the maps, books and guides in the Northern forest villages, and the people there spoke in it occasionally."

"I see. Would you mind looking through some extracts of text that Grisier copied, which are in the native language? We also have a letter from the court," DicingDevil said.

DicingDevil ushered Grisier over, and presented Starfighter with Jack's letter. Starfighter calmly accepted, and began looking carefully over the letter.