2: Axis Mundi
All thoughts of questioning Ophion about his activities were gone. She didn’t need to know his reasons for touching the darkness, or who he was conspiring with in the other Queendoms. That wasn’t important any more. What was was that the tingling sensation on her shoulder was making her shiver in anticipation. All the knowledge Dionysus had gathered was suddenly made clear to her. The mystery was solved. The path was open.
She left Ophion standing at his balcony, watching the world. He’d been waiting for this day, and now he was free. In the past, she would have blamed such an insight on instinct, but now she knew it was something else.
She could see.
***
Phantasia’s ultimate destination lay at the south pole of the planet, which she could see high up on the side of the world. She swept low over the translucent ocean, underneath which lay a myriad of settlements, faeries and elementals. Islands floated above the dark depths, into which few faeries would ever dare to dive. Phantasia glanced into the shadows and wondered what lay beyond them, in the world between the worlds. There, primordial, animalistic spirits, born of humanity’s negative emotions, their very existence a tumour eating away at the world, dwelled. There the demons – the fallen faeries and ascended humans – plotted away in their fortresses and empires, seeking to fulfil their self-centred goals of power and conquest. Phantasia darted close along the shadows, daring herself to stare further and further into their depths, so that she might see the world beyond them, but all she saw were slothful shapes, envious eyes, greedy claws reaching out as if they could penetrate the wall between the worlds and pull her shimmering white form into their lustful embrace.
Feeling herself weakening from such flagrant exposure to the darkness, Phantasia rose up towards an icy island that sliced across the ocean, its massive cliff face looming towards her. As it approached, she rose up the sheer surface, then twisted over and onto the white plains of snow. It was, for all its size, just one of the many rouge islands that floated around the world. A few faeries had made a small settlement near a shrine of ice – some kind of gateway between the worlds – but other than that, there were only the elementals roaming the cold fields. Phantasia continued on her way forward, letting the island glide away beneath her.
Soon the ocean gave way to the rocky peaks of the Earth Queendom, and Phantasia stopped to think. From atop the mountains, she surveyed the vast, shifting lands of the Innerworld that all followed the stream of life that ebbed through the planet. Only at one point did all those energies converge, a point unlike any other part of the world. A swirling maelstrom of every colour, through which the stream of the Goddess’s life energy flowed from the Outerworld into the Innerworld at one end, and returned through the other.
That is the World Axis.
She could feel him standing there with her, his hand resting gently on her shoulder. She daren’t turn her senses in his direction, knowing that the second she did, the memory would disappear as if cast into the chaotic vortex she was watching.
“I learnt the way,” she said quietly. Her body trembled as she looked into the void through which mana flowed. That was where the faeries had found her, lying naked and alone after the decisive battle of the last Apostle War. That forbidden, sealed away place was her only hope of uncovering her true identity.
