Because of the language barrier, Skyl didn't speak to the resurrected witch right away. He pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, picked up a small flashlight, and waved the beam in front of her eyes. Seeing her pupils constrict normally under the light, he moved on to give her a basic physical check-up.
He'd picked up this medical knowledge in London, leafing through books in the public library. Sometimes he felt that researching the origin of magic was very much like studying disease: the same symptoms, but traced back to different causes. The human body is a complex and precise system, whereas the structure of the universe is comparatively simple—only unimaginably vast. Truly, who could ever use a metaphor on the universe itself?
The greatness of the divine law lay in this: through a symbolic system that transcended the universe itself, it bound the universe, making the hidden, wordless rules expressible in words.
If you turned mathematics into law, then the universe would follow mathematical logic.
Mathematics has never been "truth"; it's a game invented by humans, just like Monopoly.
The rules of mathematics are rigid. Why can't one plus one equal three? Because the rules say so. Yet even primary schoolers know that one plus one can equal three—for instance, two spouses together create a child, an extra "number". But the mathematical game rejects that kind of imagination; it runs only within its mechanical, icy framework.
To make this mathematical game fit natural phenomena, humans are forced to add variables into their pure equations. Calculating the parabolic arc of a cannon shell? In pure mathematics it's just a conic curve, yet in the real world you must account for air resistance, the Coriolis effect, the curvature of the earth, and so on.
Law, then, is like the game-rules of the gods, imposed on the universe from above. If it declares that one plus one equals two, then a married couple cannot produce a child. If it declares that one equals two, then every person would be born a twin.
This is how such terrifying violence operates: it disguises itself as a natural link in the universe's own chain, so people never even realize it exists.
But as an outsider, Skyl could feel it very clearly. The moment he arrived in the Lands Between, he found his magic failing, for his spells were not recognized by the Golden Order. To cast magic here, he would either have to adapt to the Golden Order, or break it and remake it.
As an outsider, he understood all too well that the beings of the Lands Between lived in shackles, in a world firmly gripped by a god. That god was not Queen Marika, but the being known as the Greater Will.
Suddenly, a thought stirred in Skyl's mind: What makes this supreme god think only you, Greater Will, are allowed to be supreme, but I, the Tower King, am not? Dynasties rise and fall; sooner or later the wheel of fate rolls round to my doorstep. The Golden Order of the Lands Between is long overdue for replacement!
The rebellious tradition of his forebears flared up in his chest for a moment, yet in truth Skyl disliked all forms of coercive law.
He meant to seize the Golden Order and return freedom to the beings of the Lands Between. As for offering up a law, being crowned a god—that sort of thing didn't interest Skyl in the slightest. What he cared about was the law itself. That was the precious truth.
As Skyl mulled over his next move, he continued the Finger Maiden's physical examination. He was a bit absent-minded throughout the process, while she simply watched him in curiosity and made no attempt to resist.
The results were pleasing. The operation had been a success. The young woman was now as lively as a dragon.
Because Skyl had erased her death-record from the law, in theory the Finger Maiden should have been exactly the same person she had been in life. Her soul should have been plump and complete.
So when Skyl casually drew out her soul and found that its memory-core was smoother than a bare cerebral cortex and its thought-strings less dense even than a newborn's…
Hm… huh?
Skyl stared.
How did she end up… simple-minded?
He eyed the Finger Maiden suspiciously, half-wondering whether his soul-extraction spell had gone rusty and accidentally damaged her memory-core.
The odds of that were low. When he'd been designing the soulstone abattoir assembly line in Winterhold, Skyl had already honed his art of soul extraction to a transcendent level. Even the soul of a single firefly could be peeled off intact by his hand, like the way Uncle Li peels raw eggs in the movie "A World Without Thieves"—and he could put that soul back just as flawlessly.
He was an old artisan at this by now. How could he possibly slip?
Skyl shoved the soul back in, took out his notebook, and jotted down the experimental results. Then he began listing possible reasons why the outcome did not match his expectations.
Once the Finger Maiden's soul settled back into place, she watched him scribbling in his notebook. The flashlight lay nearby, so she imitated what Skyl had done earlier: picked it up and shone the beam directly into his eyes.
Skyl waved her away.
The resurrected witch did not even know how to walk. Her brain function was clearly healthy and her cerebellar balance solid, yet she would only crawl on the ground. If a baby had done this, it would have been quite cute. With a grown woman doing it, Skyl's first thought was Sadako.
He had no choice but to pause his notes and first teach the witch how to walk upright on two legs. A small step for the Finger Maiden, but a giant leap in the evolution of humankind.
The resurrected witch kept trying to give Skyl a physical exam in return.
"Quit pawing at me."
"Quit… paw… at… me," the witch muttered.
"Interesting." Skyl perked up. The behavioral logic she was showing was unlike that of an infant. It seemed she was not a wholly new soul, but had simply forgotten too much, with some instincts still intact. In that case, with a good post-op recovery, there was still a chance she might regain her memories.
And that in turn could bring a fresh breakthrough in Skyl's research on souls and law.
Over the next few days, Skyl took some time to return to World I to tidy up the trouble named Rita Skeeter. After that, he was back in the Chapel of Anticipation, carrying out basic physics experiments. He needed to prepare a few destructive spells that could settle things in one strike; once those were ready, he could begin surveying the ecology of the Lands Between, collecting biological data, and pursuing further research.
He left the witch in the care of the house-elf Gally, so she wouldn't slip away while his back was turned. It had already happened once, nearly costing her her life.
On the plaza outside the Chapel of Anticipation there was a monster called the Grafted Scion, which squatted there to ambush Tarnished returning to the Lands Between. Skyl had never bothered with the thing before. Then, a few days earlier, after he had finished a configuration experiment with his Freezing Ice Storm spell, he realized the Finger Maiden was nowhere to be seen. Stepping out, he saw she had been cornered by the Grafted Scion. Another second and she would have been cut down.
The Grafted Scion was like a bloated spider, its twisted body propped up by multiple warped arms. At its core was the frail form of a noble youth, whose body had been fitted, by wicked surgery, with the limbs of other powerful creatures to gain strength. By all rights, grafting other people's arms onto yourself should only weigh you down, yet under the rules of the Golden Order, this grotesque arrangement actually worked.
Skyl saw the Finger Maiden standing before the Grafted Scion as the monster raised its slender ceremonial straight sword high. The blade gleamed brilliantly, stars of cold light winking along its edge. A single casual stroke would be enough to take her life.
Amid the sweeping winds that scoured the desolate ruins, her back was like a pale flower blooming in front of a tank's treads.
Arms spread wide, she radiated a resolve that knew no fear—or perhaps the mercy that embraces heretics.
In that instant, Skyl caught a glimpse of the Finger Maiden's past: a brave, fragile soul, a martyr who used her own body to shield others from the blade.
Perhaps, before her death, she had once stood in front of the Grafted Scion to block its strike for someone else as well.
Before the monster could swing its sword, a freezing beam slanted down from above. The ray itself should have been invisible and colorless, but as it carved through the air it left behind a thread of icy blue, like a pale stroke of paint drawn across the scroll of the world. Every gust of wind that passed through that space shed a fine dust of ice crystals.
The Grafted Scion's sword remained raised, frozen in place. Frost spread rapidly across its surface, like white mold blooming over food. Its organs, bones, and flesh all froze solid, yet it retained a basic spark of life, transformed into a living ice sculpture standing in the battered, ancient plaza.
The witch blinked, reached out to touch the ice statue, then held up her reddened, frozen hands to Skyl. "Cold."
"…"
That wasn't fearlessness at all. She was just a big, fearless idiot who didn't even know what fear was.
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