It was important to remember that I was deciphering one of my shards of lightning by using my domain as a reference, since each shard was a facet of my domain, and all of this exploration and mysteries were on a single shard... What about the other eight?
At the beginning, when I was observing my consciousness frozen inside my domain, I believed I had been stopping time; after all, that was the only conclusion I could draw from the evidence before me.
It is a seductive reading to be sure; when time stops, it is the ultimate form of magic as I knew it. Nothing moves, nothing propagates, nothing decays, and anyone I trap in my domain experiences no time.
If Master Halloway had not been in my head, I would have written that consciousness was stopped in time in my note, and everything after would have been built on a lie.
Two things stopped me from falling fully into this trap.
The first is that time is not mine to touch. The same way there was a barrier from Arcanist to Sovereign, was the same way I could sense a shape to what a tier permits, and you learn to feel the edges of it after enough deaths.
Working on time is something I could touch at the Sovereign level, maybe even above that work. Whatever my Domain is doing, it is doing it with tools an Arcanist is allowed to hold, and time is not one of them.
So, it did not matter that the consciousness was seemingly frozen in time; my domain was doing something else.
The second reason is the cost. My Domain spends Anima per second. If seconds did not pass inside it, there would be no seconds in which to spend them. The bill itself proves that time is running in there exactly as it runs out here, only that my consciousness was not experiencing time.
So, time passes, and nothing moves, nothing propagates, nothing falls, nothing reaches outward... all the evidence was here, and if I took it for what it was, then the truth was simply: it is not time that was stopped; it is space.
I think I have spent an entire day here, and I may have deciphered the mystery of the first shard.
∞
I sat on the floor and turned over everything I had discovered while I ignored the screams of the demon.
Pulling up my Space Resonance, I began running it against what I knew about my domain, and another deeper truth emerged.
My Domain does not hold objects. It holds the space the objects are in, and it holds it by pressure, and this pressure came from the raw weight of my Anima Depth pressed onto a volume of the world until the world stops being able to do anything in it.
The dust inside my domain does not fall because there is no through left for it to fall through, and the stone chip I had pushed into has no deceleration gradient because it is not being resisted; it simply runs out of space that permits movement.
And it gets four centimetres in, four centimetres! Because that is the depth at which my pressure has actually finished setting. The boundary of my Domain is not the edge of the effect. It is the edge of where the effect is still arriving.
The Loom thread cannot decay because decay is a process, and processes need somewhere to occur.
Anima circulates but cannot reach outward, because within the vessel is space I am not pressing on, and outward is space I am.
Thought does not progress because a mind is a thing that happens in a place, and I have taken the place away.
And the reason it costs by the second is that space does not want to be held like that. It is not gravity I am fighting, and it is not time. It is the world’s constant insistence on being ordinary in that volume, and I am leaning on it, continuously, with everything I have, and it is leaning back.
The lightning does not travel. It arrives.
Because travelling is a thing you do through space... and if space itself is yours, there is nothing to cross.
∞
I want to be careful about what I actually have, because I nearly made a mistake a moment before.
I have not understood Stillness. I have understood what my Domain does, which is not the same thing and is the smaller of the two prizes. I know the mechanism now. I do not yet know why the mechanism exempts me, and I do not know what the four centimetres are really telling me, and I do not know why my domain was a hundred and seventy-five metres of radius instead of a hundred or two hundred.
And I know one more thing, because I could feel it the whole time I was working, the way you feel a cracked tooth with your tongue.
My Domain is fractured, and this should not be normal. I had nine shards, but somehow I believe that each shard should be a complete law.
However, as every shard I was understanding was healing this fracture, since my domain was built on nine faces of a Law that had been running on shards I collected and never comprehended, powerful and incoherent, like a wheel with most of its spokes driven in at the wrong angle.
Every shard I take apart is a spoke set true.
And if that is right, if each of these nine is a face of one thing, and the Domain is where all nine faces meet, then this is not nine separate excavations that end in nine separate tricks. It is one long road with one destination, and I can see it from here even if I cannot yet walk it.
Not a domain that presses on space. A domain that is defined by the terms of the space it occupies. And somewhere past that door, where I am not permitted to look yet, is the thing I nearly claimed today and had no right to... Time.
The Stillness of the Storm at Sovereign... maybe something even more, since each shard I am exploring felt like a complete law... I don’t know if it was normal for an Arcanist to have shards like mine, but until my domain was completed, I will never know what I would become.
∞
I brought my note forward, and I began to write.
SHARD I — STILLNESS
"The lightning does not travel... It arrives."
MECHANISM: The Domain does not stop objects. It freezes SPACE by the pressure of Anima Depth.
Matter: no descent, no "through" remains.
Energy: suspended mid-act, no decay, processes need somewhere to occur.
Anima: circulates within, cannot cross outward.
Thought: no interval experienced, a mind happens in a place; the place is taken.NOT TIME. Time runs (proof: per-second cost).
Time is a power I can touch at the Sovereign level and beyond. Do not confuse pressure with permission.
Boundary = condition, not wall.
Four cm penetration = depth where pressure finishes setting.
Domain is FRACTURED. Nine faces, none comprehended. Each shard understood = one step towards domain completion.
ROAD ENDS AT: The Stillness of the Storm, Sovereign tier.
So many mysteries left to unravel, and yet it was also more than I understood about my own soul this morning, and I figured it out by myself, I thought with a little bit of pride inside me.
I sat with my back against the wall and tapped my head with my pen while a demon was screaming my name in the background.
It felt like I was standing before something truly massive, and yet I did not know what I truly had.
Well, there was nothing better to do than to press forward.
I put my hand back on the shard and invoked all I understood about Stillness.
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