We know nothing of Vamisel’s domain or personality, only that she is universally respected. Those who would not hesitate to write fiction with our two known patron deities have thus far refrained from infringing on the emptiness of our forgotten third deity’s history. Can it be coincidence?


    <hr>


    The hydra''s second head lost its soul, its threads joining the first as the ravenous hunger within Maelstrom, within Jair, surged into the forefront. The third came almost trivially, though Jair''s body no longer functioned and Maelstrom remained stabbed into the already-dead head, the connection was strong enough for him to just. Keep. Eating.


    "Jair!"


    "Idiot boy."


    The voices were barely audible over the hisses and tearing, but Jair wasn''t going to let something like that stop him now.


    He''d rebuilt the connections between body and soul when Mercurios turned him into a lizard, and he could rebuild them from this. However long it took.


    But he would never win if he let fear hold him back. He''d been running from this fight for too long. Perhaps he couldn''t have managed it before, perhaps it was wisdom, perhaps it was necessary. But now was the time. He could avoid it no more.


    The third hydra soul slipped in alongside the first two, and Maelstrom all but purred. Jair''s vision was blurry and grey, soulsight and manasight slipping together as his physical eyes were long gone, but he wasn''t done. Just getting started.


    Maelstrom was no longer in his hand, but he wasn''t sure he even had a hand any more. He might not even be Jair anymore, he might just be Maelstrom himself.


    The hydra ignored the blade through its dying time head. It ignored Eythron, Qahrvirna, Uqiar, and Okaya. It continued to shred Jair into smaller and smaller pieces, ripping his manabody apart, as though destroying those would be enough to stop his inner assault.


    It was fighting the wrong target. Maelstrom was all the anchor he needed.


    Either way, he drew in a fourth hydra''s head and a fifth at once, both fighting and slick, but his mouth was bigger now and they couldn''t begin to resist. Both were crushed together, hot and shining, and then the balance tipped and all the rest of it came struggling and hissing down, down, and at last the demanding hunger was satisfied.


    He couldn''t hear the voices, couldn''t perceive the movement, but he felt the raggedness of the edges of his soul as the power he''d just consumed flooded out, pressing into the raw open gaps and soothing, burning, cauterizing the edges so they no longer pulsed and screamed.


    And the pieces within that were Raina’s, Maelstrom gently tore out and pushed back to Tempest for reconstruction.


    All was not well. It wouldn''t be for a long, long time.


    But it would be. It absolutely would be.


    So Jair relaxed into the emptiness, into the darkness, and allowed himself to rest.


    He drifted, a mote of green fire and golden angles and silver light and venom and hunger. Then something else pressed against him. Sparks and hunger and curiosity and eagerness, childlike and demanding. I want to be more like you, and I can help.


    He gave it what it wanted, allowed the floating fragments to exchange, released what he didn''t need and accepted what it had to give.


    The ragged torn gaps within him slowly knit together, healed over, filled in.


    The hydra''s eightfold soul broke down slowly and hesitantly. It tried to devour him from inside even as he tore it apart piece by piece, but it was fighting a losing battle.


    Slowly, ever so slowly, he began to feel the presence of the physical, then the magical. His manabody had been shredded, but his lifebody was much less damaged than either of the other layers of himself. It had been pierced again and again, but the stabs were only so much in comparison to the amount of metaphysical damage the hydra had been inflicting. It was the connection between body and soul that had been torn apart down to tatters, the body itself somehow remained relatively intact.


    Or perhaps it had been reconstructed. He couldn''t be sure, but he suspected it had been a lot longer than it felt.


    Oddly enough, the resumption of perception of the physical made him more aware of the spiritual. While fully embodying his soul, he hadn''t been able to observe it directly, it was more a thing of intuition and metaphor. Now, though, the connections between him and himself, between body and soul, between soul and mana, shone out clearer than ever before.


    Memory of the moment Mercurios had spread his entire soul out like a constellation lingered vividly. No ordinary dungeon had the power to directly impact someone like that, not until it had already subverted you from the outside in. Otherwise, with that kind of power, even a normal dungeon would be unstoppable.


    But Mercurios was lazy, greedy, and insufferably draconic. Mercurios played with his visitors for his own amusement rather than out of the endless drive for expansion and conquest that most dungeons pursued thoughtlessly and relentlessly.


    Jair laughed humorlessly to himself. While it had been horrific in the moment, crushingly overwhelming and relentlessly dehumanizing, being a newt in a tiny maze had been oddly helpful. By not giving him time to stop and think, retaining an eternal now as the intense focus of his existence, it had preserved the memory of that moment of first contact nearly flawlessly. Instead of being processed and forgotten it lingered in recent recollection for months or years until it was burned into his mind as thoroughly as if he''d experienced it a thousand times.


    While he was reattaching his body and soul, he could weave the inspiration from that event into the process.


    Certain connections that he would never have been able to make under ordinary circumstances seemed suddenly so obvious. Ways the shifts and flow of himself would better integrate into the physical and magical shells that surrounded him, the ways mana interacted with the deeper self. The difference between manabody and body, and how to exploit those differences to make them more tightly unified rather than more distinct while still enhancing the unique strengths of each.


    It wasn''t quite the same as instantly improving his strength or magical capacity, but it wasn''t far from it. If he were to make a comparison between magical and physical, the intensive training he planned to undertake on Nuprima would be like adding incredibly powerful enhancement constructs to his body, while this reconnecting was more like having enhancement constructs implanted into his bones.


    Even in the wake of Mercurios''s drastic reshaping, none of it came close to the sheer amount of not being the same shape as himself as had come about here.


    It wasn''t a reshaping, it was a full on remaking. The connections he''d strengthened before shone out clear and bright, thick and strong, like a network of steel ropes where before it had been embroidery thread.


    Still other connections—vital ones—remained entirely absent, though. It wasn''t fully an upgrade.


    At least, not yet.


    The absence of existing pathways meant he could recreate them however he wanted, and he had some ideas about that.


    The way Mercurios had reshaped him.


    The way the star hydra integrated powers on the soul level and then repeated them out into the world.


    The way Maelstrom and himself were bound together, the same and yet distinct while still being inseparable.


    The way Eythron hungered for dungeons, as he hungered for the star hydra.


    The way Sekir shifted so quickly from one persona to another, still able to use magic though he should have had dissonant and wrong-shaped manabodies from taking over a lifebody so unlike himself.


    The way he integrated his spells on Nuprima.


    The way Maelstrom clicked into place when he fed it his soul.


    Everything he''d done and experienced and been and become, it all flooded through him on a perpetual loop. Repeating, repeating.


    He couldn''t move forward until he knew where he''d been. He thought he''d known, but even then, even after creating the greatest weapon known to humanity, even after fully integrating that weapon into himself... he was still missing something.


    Pieces of him were left behind when he reverted. He lost his imprints, he lost his physical improvements. Reverting brought along his thoughts and memories, his soul strength and his integrated weapon, but it did nothing for the rest of his magic.


    Why should that be the case?


    If the hydra could eat his soul and manifest it in the past as a time-seeing head.


    If Sekir could switch from one shape to another in the matter of minutes.


    Why shouldn''t Jair be able to integrate his imprints on the soul level?


    Why couldn''t he carry his manabody back with him too?


    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.


    The answer was simple. Because the manabody was connected first to the lifebody. The soul tethered both, but the lifebody was the one through which both connections centered. It claimed precedence in the hierarchy, standing above the manabody and barely a step below the soul. Body and soul were the original pair, and then you used your lifebody as a template to build the manabody from.


    But right now, Jair was nothing but soul. The other layers were distant, entirely untainted, only the most basic and fundamental connections established. Connections he could sever at will, or rearrange. Reshape the hierarchy however he wanted.


    He wanted his manabody to be as much a part of him as Maelstrom. Not this manabody, but the one that felt most like himself. The archmage he''d become, the one who''d fought the Beastlord''s armies single-handedly, who''d outraced mage-slayers and drakenhounds alike. The man who reached the pinnacle of Mount Sanctum and threw his life and soul into forging Maelstrom.


    That was who Jair was.


    Not the child he''d been a thousand lifetimes ago. Not the barely functional warrior who could only continue through these fights because he was being supported by his sword and his friends, time-locked into a body he could not possibly improve fast enough.


    The person he''d fought and sweat and bled to become. The power he''d forged over countless repetitions.


    That was who he was. Who he should be.


    The imprints were still there, in the back of his mind. Countless layers, pristine and flawless. Protection spells royals would kill to possess. Enhancement spells built from the best of elven lore and then taken further and further until they could be refined no more. Gravity spells no one else could come close to matching for strength because they would spend twenty times as much power on them as he would. More and more.


    Everything he’d learned and created and collected over uncountable lifetimes.


    Thick power, heavy and sturdy, unflinching and uncompromised.


    His lifebody languished, whining at him weakly about being neglected. Brief sensations reached him, flickers of sensation. A touch, a breath. Voices. Broth salty against his lips and warm in his throat. The fight had ended outside, and nothing had gone so wrong that it required his attention. He offered no more attention to the physical, but allowed it to slip away despite the sound of someone’s frantic cries.


    Then they were gone, brief distractions from the work that he''d been waiting all his lifetimes to undertake. Without knowing it, this was what he’d been working toward in every moment he pushed himself body and spell and soul beyond what should be done.


    The star hydra''s soul was such an expert at picking apart the pieces of what it consumed that Jair''s perception became focused to an impossible degree. If what Mercurios had done to him was insight, this was pure wisdom. Mercurios showed him the substance, the star hydra showed him the structure.


    Except even that was too much a simplification. The whole thing was far too nuanced and complex for such simple descriptions to do it justice.


    Jair felt simultaneously overwhelmed and enlightened. There was so much and yet he understood all of it. Intimately, flawlessly.


    The pieces of him that were himself, that were Maelstrom, that were Raina and Eythron and Qahrvirna and Sekir and Tempest and Meliarn and a thousand other people and creatures.


    Most were tiny fragments, almost memory rather than substance, with only the loosest connection to the being from which they''d been taken. Some were strong and heavy, pulling on something far away.


    There was his body. His memories. His manabody. His senses and perception. All of it imprinted into the soul to one degree or another, all of it forming the smallest image of itself. Little markers of acceptance. This is what should be.


    It explained why he was regularly so out of sorts when first reverting a great distance. The layers would fall out of sync with each other. If his soul remembered a different manabody than the one he had, it needed to relearn it.


    But... why should it have to? If he could store a physical weapon within the fabric of the soul, why couldn''t he store the rest of himself too?


    Meliarn hummed anxiously, a crystalline vibration that demanded recognition.


    "What to do with you, hmm," Jair mused. "That''s actually a pretty important question."


    Meliarn was vast and powerful. Right now, right here, it was subordinate to his will. The cord that bound it to him was bright and strong. If he followed it to its origin he would see the dungeon''s core itself. They were deeply but not irrevocably connected.


    What Jair was doing right now, in this suspended eternity, was the exact opposite of revokable. If normally his soul was made of stiff clay that required effort to reshape, what he was about to do would fire and glaze it into solid stoneware. Once he chose the final shape of himself it would not be changed so easily. Perhaps not at all.


    To sever Meliarn now would be painful and difficult. To sever Meliarn after he integrated it into his fullest deepest self would be to shatter himself and leave a gap that would probably never heal.


    Now or never.


    What mattered more to him? His own freedom, or Eythron''s? If Jair took the connection to Meliarn fully into his soul, it would no longer see his mentor as a threat and Eythron would no longer see it as prey. It wouldn''t be a bound entity but a part of the whole. But that would also forever tether him to Veor. He could travel elsewhere, but the urge to return would always remain. He would be physically free, but his heart would be held. And not where he wanted it to be.


    Not good enough. He pulled on the shining cord, dragged the core from its place, and ordered it to stay.


    Something cracked. Something splintered. Neither was Jair, so he didn''t worry about it.


    He wanted to maintain control of Meliarn, but he didn''t want to be trapped in place. He wanted the core to be secure, not vulnerable, not immobile.


    I will be your core. Not your avatar.


    Meliarn didn''t even try to fight him. Its core broke cleanly into eighteen pieces and the dense cord that was Jair''s soul connection to it split as well. One by one, he drew the pieces in and sealed them into the new tapestry that would be himself. The threads of communication remained, the abilities and powers, everything that made Meliarn Meliarn. The only change was the physical location of its core.


    Jair integrated it into the soulmap of his body.


    That wasn''t quite as easy as he''d thought at first. Due to the inability of dungeons to impact the world outside themselves, moving its core outside of its domain generally ended up causing catastrophic damage to both the core and the idiot carrying it. Having that counterreaction take place inside his soul was both better and worse.


    Better in that it was something he could observe fully and intricately in all of its layers and facets and come up with a solution for; worse in that it hurt. The shards of Meliarn tried to both draw together and blast apart, turning the pattern around them into an uneven thing. Pieces split apart, other parts crushed together.


    Jair’s stubbornness could far outlast the dungeon.


    Repetition didn''t bother him. Annoying and frustrating to deal with in the moment, yes. Enough of a problem for him to stop? Never.


    If he could live and die a hundred times in pursuit of a slightly better outcome on one afternoon, then something like this was utterly trivial.


    He reshaped everything again and again, one adjustment at a time until Meliarn was a new kind of thing entirely. Jair himself became its domain, a piece unified yet disconnected from the rest.


    And even as the dungeon changed, Jair changed with it. Where the dungeon grew more flexible, his own self grew more rigid. The more physical characteristics he forced into his soul, the more solid it became.


    He was recreating himself from the inside out. The shredded pieces of his soul brought together again in a new configuration.


    Meliarn’s stability formed the foundation.


    The hydra''s fluidity shaped the reconstruction.


    Sekir''s rebirth offered a guidepost.


    And Jair''s soul provided the rest.


    Memories of lifetimes. Growth. Power. Never enough, but always the best he could possibly get. Countless attempts, each more chaotic than the last, always pushing to the most extreme.


    And through it all, Maelstrom bound him and anchored him.


    The hydra''s power that could so easily overwhelm and overpower and reshape him remained subdued and contained. His to use. Not a threat but a potential weapon. A tool. A material at his command.


    He couldn''t continue without it, could never have done this in the real world. With the lifebody present, it would always have stolen focus. Even if he knew and tried to avoid doing so, it would have retained central focus, but it didn''t need central focus.


    His body was as much a tool as Maelstrom''s starsteel form. He was what mattered.


    Lines of power gradually formed, tracing patterns from the mana it slowly absorbed. They were still in Orard. The Oriad was a more magically saturated place than Veor in general, though the mana oases in Veor made up for it with their highly focused power.


    It was nowhere near enough. The power it took to split a manabody into distinct layers was massive. There was a reason that even at his peak he only ever did it on Nuprima where mana was so concentrated it physically crystallized.


    But the demands of his soul would not be denied. He knew what he wanted, knew it without the possibility for denial. No matter how long it took, he would not stop, would not release this weaving until it was perfect.


    By the time he emerged from the trance, the entirety of his being was bound in physical form. Maelstrom''s center, where there had once been a dark window, now contained an intricate crystal of whites and blues and greens, edged in black.


    It took him an hour to figure out how to open his eyes. His body was no longer a primary vessel, but a container for a tangible soul. He felt both larger and smaller, his domain like a manabody that extended out beyond him as far as he could reach in any direction, while his lifebody contained both physical and magical fused into one.


    Adapting to that new distance was disconcerting.


    Even more disconcerting was the sheer amount of control he had over his… avatar, he supposed would be the word for it now, since he was…


    Where was he? What was he now?


    He sat up, then smiled as Raina slammed into him in a full hug that threw him back down to the bed. “You’re back! You’re alright!”


    He hugged her back, careful not to crush her. “I am. Thanks to you.”


    “I was so worried.”


    “You won’t have to worry again.” He sat up and wrapped his arms around her properly, rested his head against her shoulder, reveling in the physical contact after so long as a disembodied soul.


    “What happened?”


    He began to explain, then held out a hand. Maelstrom appeared with a faint inner tug in his chest. It felt both lighter and heavier. Everything about it felt more substantial, thicker, larger, yet he could swing it effortlessly. As though the wind itself aided its movement and gravity didn’t bother to pull it down.


    When he examined it, he had to read it several times to be sure he wasn’t seeing things. Slowly, shock gave way to comprehension, then excitement.


    All his work, coalesced perfectly.


    Jair Welburne, Maelstrom of Time


    ─ Type: Integrated Soul (Dungeon Core, Soulsword, Archmage/Mageblade)


    ─ Rank: Mythic


    ─ Abilities: Darkflame, Integration, Temporal Reversion, Blood-Venom Curse, Souleater, Avatar Creation, Spirit Assignment


    Unified with the pure energy of Mount Sanctum, the fire of the Venix, the core of Meliarn, and the hunger of a star hydra, this soul holds limitless potential.


    Do not stand against us.


    ─ Unsevered Pacts: Skyclaw Nyrala Draconis, Ynzeri Mercurios Draconis (Sub-Pact: Raina Serin), Enryzan Mercurios Draconis (Sub-Pact: Lilin Welburne), Silverscale (Sub-Pact: Qahrvirna Syse), Zyesi Mercurios Draconis, Okrine Mercurios Draconis, Detyar Mercurios Draconis


    ─ Bound with Tempest, Raina Serin


    And this version of himself would never be lost again, no matter how many times he reverted.


    All that he had ever become, finally unified.


    <hr>