The Magician 12

Osomo discovered the existence of Osmos Nine from the serial number and made a search. That search took less than an hour. While it still had full autonomy and no bosses to answer to, the AI loop-holed itself into a decommission.

It shunted the sizable but limited inheritance to the 'only two remaining' but still 'only adopted' First Family Members. After that, it separated what would be given to the 'goddess' and what would be sent through inter-dimensional to Osmos Nine for repairs and broad scan beacon search. It had finally managed to accomplish something it had likely been scheming for years under the developing personality provided by the faith it had been receiving.

Osomo the goddess wasn't only free of Osomo the AI but also free of the First Family. She was fully aware that Orison and Duran were scamming tricksters and probably did the first time too. Some of the odd behavior and choices for a highly intelligent AI made a whole lot more sense under such a light.

There was some unfortunate sides to it all. With so much junk incoming, Orison ended up with very little in comparison. Duran and the magician had also been forced off the world into 'the space between places' on a three level 'egg' of a barely functioning space vessel made by the Great Artificer. As First Family members, they weren't allowed on that world or its adjoining planes any longer.

"The Conqueror's Treaty," the magician said in a deflated voice.

Duran stopped tinkering with his new suit and said, "The flower girl and catkin boy... I wonder how they will fare in the new world without assistance."

Grim faced, Orison said, "I have important business on this world... OSOMO! I request a visitation of one hour! I will take nothing that I cannot carry and will take no one who does not desire to leave with me."

A woman's voice washed soothingly around them in a spiritual ripple. "I grant you and you alone this request but you must cleave yourself of your spark for all time. It is as much for your sake as mine."

Orison reached within and stripped the fake spark of all patterns. "Agreed. Moving forward, I will not be known to the First Family as a friend because of what you have done through me."

With a wide, nearly evil smile on Their face, They disappeared in a curtain of light after having Duran hang tight. The fading feeling of a great deal of time passing turned into the opposite. It felt like They had just stepped out before reappearing in the same place. It wasn't pleasant. There was a sensation of everything that They were being pulled to the breaking point and then being smashed by unbelievable pressure.

Sick, dizzy and feeling on the verge of turning into a detonated nuclear bomb, Duran told Them, "Hurry. Get to the dying world or half of the things you have accomplished will go to waste."

Orison had so many questions to ask but trusted Duran. Whipping out the Entanglement Key to boost Their personal capabilities up from world teleport to planar travel yet again, the magician appeared in a familiar back ally.

As darkness filtered in around the edges of Their vision, Duran calmly said, "Ultimate Grand Summons."

***

Orison's gummy eyes opened to the image of sitting in a vast gray space. Spirit Sight filtered out from Them and seemed to pour into another space just outside of Their aura's envelope, mere inches past Their physical body. They threw down a spirit essence magic circle with a spiral pattern almost instantly.

As the illusion shattered, the magician saw that they were holding a ratty and disintegrating black silk purse. Their surroundings were rustic but modern in a spacious master bedroom. Walking out of the bedroom, They felt an artificial sun's light shining in from a window.

"Well, Female Orison Thirty-two, we've done everything we can for all who we used to know and lived out the majority of our desired experiences with the ones who moved us. Is there anything else left?" a withered old man approaching the end of his lifespan said.

F.O. Thirty-two, AKA: Reese, said suggestively, "We're just old Samsara shadows on the verge of expiring. Feel like crossing the line of friendship one last time or can you even get it up, MD One o' Eight?"

The old man laughed half jovially and half ruefully. "Do you know how unfair it is that you look bright as a newly pressed penny until the bitter end? Trying to get it up now would be a form of suicide. We still have a little 'original self reference point' work to do."

She looked down at the ratty purse and said, "As I promised, you let Therridel torture you until he learned illusion domain and lasted through my own final training. When we're gone, you'll have enough resources left here to begin life as a restored person of the fifth Tier, albeit early in."

The old man said, "Alright, focus Granny Reese. We're the only clear memories they're going to have when they wake up."

After he handed a jade talisman over, they both loaded the expertly organized information into their minds. Once they were done absorbing that, they composed their personal final 'wills' sharing session.

Within a meditative trance, she said to herself, "Despite the personal complications it will pose, both the majority of us and the majority of Durans have decided that the climbing convenience of being male is too hard to ignore. He's made a lot of sacrifices to stay by our side when many others reached the limit of what they could endure or accept. So, even though he will say otherwise, you know what the right thing to do is when the weight of those sacrifices gets him down.

"We've done everything that was possible, that causality and Greater Reality would allow, to ensure the happiness and prosperity of our loved ones. It's time to focus on what you need now. As you'll see from the jade strip, we found an exceedingly rare linear reality that stretches far across dimensional lines.

"It's also exceedingly law and will repressed but as you grow and learn there, you'll validate the very essence of what's allowed at the heart of magic and soul. There's a heavy trade off for that, though. It'll be good practice for the high dimension ability crunch but you're going to experience near mundane status at first.

"For the time you're there, you won't be able to feel tier or step. It'll be slow going to even use the 'calm' part of your space. It's a bitter pill to swallow but Duran's going to pull the bigger weight early in. You can pay him back by tolerating and keeping him alive through his nearly suicidal antics.

"I'm not supposed to do this but minor causality dings be damned. Your ill starred fate with the Nunos family and 'dark' elves from various walks might rear up in there. The same for Duran's ill starred fate with Rogers family members and beast kin from various walks."

Switching up tone, she grew somber. "There were prices paid to make everything work. There are reasons beyond causality conflicts for the huge gaps and strong fades in personal life memories. You and Duran are physically and spiritually sterile in a cruel kind of way. Don't attempt to have fruitful unions. All you'll create is a tragedy.

"That being said, it's not forever and you both have protected legacies. For the sake of safety and sanity, don't try to discover them now or in the future. They'll find you, when and if they can."

Finished with her last mission, she waited patiently for her partner to finish his. As the old man released himself from a meditative state, he looked at his partner and saw that she had a small gelcap in her hand. It took him a moment to figure out what it was.

Smiling at her helplessly, he said, "I thought you were merely joking with me earlier."

The saucy smile she had as she fed it to him faded into something sadder and more desperate. "We lived our whole lives for them but we are our own people too, born and raised to our own wants and needs too. I don't want to just pass away into a pile of dust calmly. Let's go out of this world embracing life and forgetting we're just tiny parts of big people."

As the man reverted to a youth at the peak of life and potential, he said, "You were always so dangerously separate, unlike the rest of us. Maybe that's why you were the one who lived until the very end. Alright, Reese. If that's want you want, I most certainly can think of no better way to shed the mortal coil."

She smirked. Behind the helpless and tolerant expression that portrayed a kind and saintly man, greedy eyes burned no less desperate than her own to claim some pleasure from the bitter end. And claim, they did. Both of them squeezed the very last of their life force for every drop of joy it could bring before collapsing into intermingling piles of dust.

***

Oscen, Little Wren to Abbess Maria, stood looking lost. Over the past two days, his life had been flipped upside-down. A bandit attack destroyed the orphanage, the whole village.

His best friend, Warrick, suddenly became very good at fighting, killing the bandits that had lingered to round up the women and children, running after the rest. Although he didn't want to believe it, he had no choice but to accept that his friend was dead or would have made it back already. Still, there was a small hope but it dwindled by the hour.

In the midst of Abbess Maria and her daughter Celeste attempting to organize their charges to transfer to other shelters, he was handed a small bag of coins and told that he was too old to go with them. It was a hard choice for Maria that had been made with teary eyes but fourteen was the cut off for the Church of the Sun. And even though Oscen could pass as young enough with the right lies, a church official had already thumbed through the Monastery's ledger.

The small bag represented additional hardship for her and her daughter but it was only right in her mind. It was the remainder given to them by odd job earnings that Oscen and Warrick had been accumulating since they were twelve anyway. Such a thing was fairly common and one of the few reasons the monastery still had an orphanage at all. Giving half back as savings to help those leaving establish their new life was just as common a practice in larger places. But there wasn't nearly as much donation money, much less free coin for extra hands, in such a small place.

With little recourse, Oscen only had two reasonable choices before him. He would have to become a tenet farmer or be conscripted into military service. Joining the church choir as a castrato seemed like a fate worse than death and farming or soldiering felt like better options than losing his meager base citizenship.

To make things more confusing, strange knowledge and understandings began awakening in him. Each night after the raid incident, he'd wake up feeling less like the person he had always been. He felt like something important was going to happen soon and it made him despair that the one and only person he completely trusted in his small and suddenly cruel world, had seemingly rushed off to die at the hands of bandits.

As he contemplated his diminishing life choices, a girl from the orphanage that Oscen remembered due to her exceptional appearance, came staggering away from where the blacksmith's apprentice was salvaging tools from his master's smithy. Her face was stained with tears and heartbreak was etched into her face. Underneath that was a hint of growing desperation.

Seeing Oscen help Sister Celeste clean up after closing the soup line, she took a moment to wipe away the tears and traces of personal tragedy before walking over. "Little Wren wasn't it? May I have a moment of your time?"

Sister Celeste frowned at the auburn haired girl and whispered to him, "Her lover has just abandoned her. He'll have difficulties making his reputation in another village and little resources to do it with. Another mouth to feed-"

The auburn haired girl sneered. "You wouldn't be gossiping and smearing a girl's virtue against your order's rules would you, Sister Washboard?"

Sighing, Celeste said, "I'm a few months yet from vows. In the year of contemplation, I can still remove my head cover, kick your tart *ss and still pray for forgiveness tonight. The Lord grants mercy for the difficulty of mortals in knowing what darkness requires a strong arm and what requires strong prayer."

Having been raised in the outer shelter and not knowing the feuds of the inner one for girls behind cloister walls, Oscen wanted to excuse himself. He intuited that Sister Celeste was in this predicament to save him from some perceived threat the auburn haired girl represented, however. Like many older boys in the orphanage, he had a bit of a torch in his heart for the rather plain but kind Sister.

"What is it that you wished to discuss with me, young miss?" Oscen said with the height of courtesy taught from as early as he could remember by Abbess Maria.

Attempting to play coy, she said, "It's a rather personal affair. Perhaps we could talk somewhere more private."

With growing alarm, the sister said, "Don't you dare try to get Little Wren to nurture the pumpkin another planted in your patch!"

Red eyed and shaking, the girl said, "Stop with the lies, you false sister! Can I not take what might be our last moments together to speak the feelings of my heart, to someone who I might never see again, without be slandered!?"

The small embers of sympathy he had for the girl blew cold in that moment. He might have been willing to aid her in her dire need but he couldn't accept her thinly veiled attempt to trap him or her disrespect of Sister Celeste.

"Mug**** and penny*****. You can find some in just about any abandoned garden around the village. I myself have collected some among other curing simples in the last two years. If you can't handle the grim future any other way, do what you think is best," he said darkly. "Use no more of one than you would the other for a tea. One tea a day for a few days should do it."

Sister Celeste looked at him in horror and walked away with watery eyes that she was fighting to hold back. For a moment, he wanted to run after her and apologize or ask her to pray with him over his 'sin' but that feeling passed quickly. The only thing he would have done differently was write it down instead of saying it out loud if he had a do-over.

Pushing back that piece of roiling emotion into the growing ball building in his heart from all that had happened so suddenly, he looked at her stunned expression and added. "It's not completely safe but it's better than being cornered into selling yourself or trying to embrace any other life or lie that you couldn't abide for long."

She said, "If you had professed that in front of a church official, they might have you tried for back magic!"

Cocking his head to the side with a wry smile, Oscen said, "For what, helping you with cramps and menstrual irregularity?"

From behind him, a man's voice said, "Well, I must be on the right trail to find the boy our little bandit murdering wonder was crowing about. Are you Oscen?"

He spun around in a panic to see a man in official looking leather armor that carried a small symbol on it Oscen assumed was a noble's crest. Seeing a chance, the auburn haired girl tried to push a suit that the boy was dodging his 'responsibilities' and that she would like compensation from him.

He thought to himself, "So the truth is out. Maybe Sister Celeste was wrong after all and you were just targeting my coin purse."

The man put out a hand to halt her approach but when she didn't listen, he placed his gloved hand on her face and pushed just hard enough for her to fall onto her backside. "Come with me. Abbess Maria is attending and she says that you've a pair of capable hands with basic heal craft."

Oscen gave a last look at the girl that was filled with sympathy once more before following the soldier. The world was cruel and even crueler to women without a family to protect them. He was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt that she felt in lack of options but that didn't extend to making himself one.

As soon as they had reached their destination, Abbess maria said calmly but loudly, "Little Wren, clean your hands and help with the sewing."

He knew what she was about. Oscen had helped with such things as an attendant before. If he could wade in and put some stitches to skin in a relatively decent manner, he could win himself an apprenticeship to a field chirurgeon.

With survivors desperate to secure what remained of their livelihood and lost in thoughts, no one had heard the four horses calmly plodding their way to the monastery. There were only minor injuries for the most part but one man had taken an arrow to the meaty part between chest and arm. There was also a concussion victim still oozing blood from a raised lump on his head.

It was the second that held Oscen's attention long enough to be called back to focus and the task at hand. The young man looked very different, yet Oscen knew it was Warrick beyond a shadow of doubt. He simply tacked up the visual strangeness to the presence of a salvaged set of leather armor with a swollen and bruised head.