“Let’s start with the end,” he decided and walked towards the door marked ‘Omega’. The bck gate gave at a simple touch. Hermetic seals opened with the soft hiss of moving air. As the two halves of the gate swung inwards, nearby animals hastened away from them. They had no fear of people, but they did fear whatever was inside.

  Rykard smiled and stepped into the corridor. Golden nterns along the long hall lit up magically as they advanced into the segment of the temple. The golden swirls on the walls were equal parts order and chaos, their symmetrical arrangement occasionally deviating from the norm to mimic the form of giant eyes. The air buzzed with a million unspoken words, the voices of the silent angels bound into these walls testing the spirits of those that stepped into these treasured halls.

  To the trio, those un-noises were simple static. Rykard lead the way, hands in his pockets, Tess and Lyvia in tow. Neither of the two seemed even fazed and Rykard was used to worse from contact with the eldritch fragments of the Conjuration Realm. “What god does this temple belong to?” Lyvia asked.

  “None - everyone,” Rykard answered. “How much do you know about the divine, Lyvia?”

  “Not much. In my home realm, we primarily worshipped the monster dy as the avatar of the gods. We venerate the gods as a collective.”

  “And for that you used the eye iconography, correct?” Rykard asked, remembering the statues of the first monster dy in Regalia. After Lyvia nodded, he extended the conversation to Tess. “What about you? You’re a champion of the Bond Crow, so I assume you have some knowledge?”

  “You assume wrong. I have no formal education whatsoever,” Tess answered. “My life began as an orphan on an altar without memories. Me mantling the Bond Crow was equal parts happenstance and fate. I simply had a bond with corvids.” Tess stared down the long corridor. “Although I do remember many churches having images of circles along with the universal hexagon.”

  Rykard tilted his head, inspecting one of the many optical illusions that were created by the patterns. Every other step, alignments created the image of concentric circles that broke as soon as another step was taken.

  “The hexagon is the symbol of the current order,” Rykard expined. “A shape of stability, reason, and structure. The hexagon is the symbol of our gods but it is not the symbol of the gods. The three symbols of divinity itself, the three symbols that are affiliated with all deities, are the eyes with the dotted pupil, the wings, and concentric circle. They symbolize the all-seeing presence of the gods, the ascendance of the divine, and the concentric sea.”

  “The concentric sea?” Tess asked.

  “The structure of the universe we inhabit, at least in the esoteric sense. This is a yer of existence where distances don’t really exist anymore.” Rykard wove a quick illusion spell to add a visual add. A bck sphere appeared first, keeping its retive position above Rykard as they walked and talked. “At the core of existence is the Bck Realm. This pce you can consider as ‘hyper material’. All tangible concepts are colpsed into a singur concept of being there. The Bck Realm IS.”

  “What does that mean?” Tess asked.

  “If I tell you to imagine a table, both of you will imagine something different,” Rykard said. “However, both of you will still imagine something simir. We know what a table is, even if we cannot always agree if it must have four legs or where a stool ends and a table starts. In the Bck Realm, all that flexibility is removed. The Bck Realm is the Bck Realm. It exists without fluidity in its concept or internal consistency. The Bck Realm is where entropy dies.”

  “I believe I understand, Sir,” Lyvia said.

  “Whether you do or don’t really doesn’t matter, this is the kind of knowledge that falls squarely in ‘interesting but useless’. Much like we cannot understand the creatures of raw spirituality, we cannot utilize the power of the Bck Realm. In theory, one could become part of the Bck Realm just like one can in theory become closer to the esoteric realms.” Rykard gave the bck marble a poke. “In doing so, however, one becomes an object in the truest possible sense. The spirit and soul are extinguished and the mind reduced to a clump of matter. The successful mage is immortal in the truest possible sense, but they are no longer a person. They ARE and that’s that.”

  A second yer appeared around the bck marble. It was a thin one, almost as bck, and swirled like thick smoke.

  “Then we have the Excess Material Realm. This is the realm of concepts that have just enough flexibility to be used in manipution. Most schools of magic are in contact with this realm. If I, for example, turn air into gold permanently, I use the matter from this realm to do so. It exists right under our own realm and is thus easy to reach.”

  The third yer appeared. Rykard chose to dispy their world as a series of connected Hexagons surrounded by a simple ocean.

  “We are the third and thickest yer of the concentric sea. We are where spirit and material are in bance. We have a certainty of concepts but we also have the wiggle room to be creative. Those worlds closer to the Bck Realm are less magical, those worlds closer to the outer realms are more esoteric. If I had to guess, I would say we are closer towards the outer realms, maybe even right up to the next border, if there is a solid one. Magic comes quite easily to us, after all. It courses through our very veins.”

  “Interesting. What ys even further out?” Tess asked. “The Divine Realm?”

  “Not yet. First we have the Nihilistic Barrier.” A thin, murky grey yer settled around the three previous yers, sapping the colour out of everything beneath it. “Origins of the Nihilistic Barrier are disputed. It could be the refuse of those that failed to ascend to godhood, it could be the manifestation of unproductive thoughts of sapient races or it could be an entirely natural formation that simply always was.” Rykard shrugged. “In any case, the Nihilistic Barrier is the curtain between us and the Divine Realm. The veil that makes it difficult for the two sides to interact with each other. It is a blessing in that it keeps thought-forms out and a curse in that it limits magic, forcing us to rely on mana to pierce through.”

  A new yer of radiant gold and hellish red then appeared around the sphere.

  “Then we do get to the Divine Realm. More esoteric than our Material Realm but not entirely made of thought and soul-stuff alone. Only strong entities can ascend into this realm and those that manage to become gods or at least close to gods. We call them divine, whether they are here to benefit us or not, because their power and influence is unquestionable.”

  The sixth and st yer was not a yer at all. It was a swirling mass of brussel sprouts and lightning bolts moving around the five other yers at rapid speed.

  “And then we get to the Outer Layer or, as most call it, the Conjuration Realm. Here material constrictions are a suggestion and only esoteric things matter. To be a being of the Conjuration Realm is to be fey to us at best and eldritch at worst. Elder minds exist in the furthest expanse of the endless reaches of the Conjuration Realm. As the name states, whenever one engages in summoning, they pull from here, using the intangible everything to make a something that simultaneously has always and never existed.”

  “Those elder minds you speak of, what are they?”

  “Gods in their own right, but rgely disinterested with picking a fight with the material. There are a few of them that ‘descend’ to the Divine Realm and accept the restrictions of being in exchange for the status of a divine entity. You know Ouroboros?”

  “The first god of alchemy?”

  “The very same, yes. The snake that eternally devours itself is such an elder mind turned god. Typically gods that appear humanoid are ascended mortals and gods that appear either animal-like or as formless creatures are elder minds. This is another bit of information that is rgely useless though.” Rykard dismissed the illusion with a wave of his hand. “The moment an elder mind joins the Divine Realm, they become as other gods. Whether you walk into a house from the backdoor or the front gate, you are still in the house.”

  “And that is all that matters,” Tess hummed. “Do you aim to ascend, Rykard?”

  “Perhaps after I have died.” Rykard yawned. “I do not intend to partake in the great games of the gods before I get bored of this life. The divine don’t have kings. Any pantheonic hierarchies we construct are made by us or manifestations of status games the gods py for entertainment. For all their power, they also have the obligation to keep the current state of affairs running. In a way, the gods are cosmic janitors.” Hands in his pockets, Rykard continued. “To loop back to this being a temple of all gods, divinity itself existed before the first god did. To this day, angels are created by the shapeless divine. All gods are connected to it, none can y cim to it, and it is remarkably simir to the elder minds in aesthetics. A puzzling factor for the schors.”

  “How so, Sir?” Lyvia asked.

  “If all of the concentric sea exists underneath an elder mind, that means that the entire model I just presented to you is itself an esoteric concept. It means reality doesn’t actually exist, it just is a pretension of a bored, formless, limitless thing.” Rykard rolled his shoulders. “Or maybe one such bored, formless, limitless thing found the Bck Realm and decided to interact with it and reality as we know it is the consequence of that. Alternatively, the Bck Realm is slowly pulling everything esoteric into it and making it a definitive, killing all souls in the process. The Divine Realm, in that conception, would be the lingering energies of thought forms that died from the merest touch of limitation. Who knows?”

  “You are right,” Tess said drily. “That is useless trivia.”

  “I know, right?” Rykard ughed.

  They finally spotted the end of the corridor. As they did, Tess’ eyes sparkled and her mantle of feathers opened into a pair of wings. Rapidly, she advanced, leaving the other two behind. Rykard decided to keep the casual pace.

  The reason for the blessed thief’s enthusiasm was the massive hoard of treasure that filled the chamber to the ceiling. Coins were stacked up several metres highs. Gemstones and ornate cups glistened in the light of the glowing, stained gss windows. Everything gleamed with a greed-invoking lustre.

  Rykard felt the supernatural pull on his mind but resisted easily. “Tess…”

  “Yes. I can sense it,” the thief answered. “This is a test. The unworthy get distracted by the value before them and do not go further.” Tess sat down in the middle of a heap of treasure and kicked up some of the coins. She looked at them sparkle with great glee. “I assure you, my delight is entirely my own. The magic imbued in this gold does not affect me. Gold is a woman’s best friend.”

  As if to prove the thief right, one pile of treasure parted. Gold and other precious materials fell in a cascade of the purest sound, ultimately revealing another bck gate. The temple itself had acknowledged that they were not taken in by the quick and easy treasure - even if Tess was stuffing every item she fancied into the confines of her mantle. Apparently, it doubled as a dimensional storage.

  “Take your time,” Rykard told her. “We’ll advance once you have what you want.”

  “Such a gentleman,” Tess purred.

  Seeing the goth grin was worth the dey.