As Aztu explained, I learned my experience with the Occult was uncommon among occultists.
Mainly in that I started with one of the most powerful fractals compared to everyone else: The soul fractal.
Most warlocks and occultists kept the soul fractal as the final gate to pass, leaving it to a small handful that could keep the secret. Both for prestige, but also for the more practical reasons Hexis had told me - namely, not dying early.
Other occult lineages like the wild armor ones, got squashed out too quickly specifically from discovering the soul fractal first. They’d crack open a relic armor, examine the soul fractal within and replicate it, allowing them to use all abilities of Urs's final relic armor - including strength, shields, heat, and anti-gravity. Those were connected to the central soul fractal, and they’d never be able to unlink those with simple copies. Other minor fractals lingered through the armors and could be used individually. It made wild-armor linages powerful occultists right from the start, and easily drew attention to them like a beacon.
I didn't hear of anything similar to the Winterblossom technique, so likely they didn't have an armor's AI whisper secrets of the imperial imperators Like Journey had with me. Just knowing it was possible had been what prompted me to seek out a shortcut. Imperators could move fast with training, but none were warlocks so they never worked with the fractal. And warlocks didn't spend years training or learning about relic armors, so none of them got the idea.
Still, even without the Winterblossom technique, someone always ended up drawing the eye of the machines. Not even a year into my journey as an occultist, and already I had the eyes of Relinquished herself on me. Such is the fate of occultists who venture out of their gilded towers with knowledge this arcane.
But that soul fractal made its way into Urs's armors only in his final iterations. Up till then, the armors were barebones - because Urs never discovered the soul fractal until he met Tsuya.
I was starting to see just how seperated knowledge had been among different organizations and people across the world. If Urs hadn't ever met Tsuya, his armors would have never been as they are now. And if I'd never met Cathida or gotten the administrator password from Tsyua, I'd never have come up with half the things I did.
But Tsuya had found Urs. And that was enough for the domino of effects that led to where I stood now. Talen's book into the occult, Urs's fully realized armor, Cathida's knowledge of imperators and how the armors functioned, Kidra's intuition - so much individual knowledge from different people all put together to bring me where I was now.
No wonder Hexis and the warlocks hoarded all knowledge they could find of every occult philosophy, no matter how absurd or looked down on it was. Knowledge compounded knowledge. Any random scrap of throwaway information learned could be the spark that started something new.
Years after the first relic armors were constructed, Tsyua finally found the hermit hiding away. Sharing knowledge, ideas, engineering. He opened up his plans of the relic armors, and she added her own touches to it.
He had unique advantages she didn’t. As a mitespeaker with access to his own forge, he could send and update the relic armors whenever he chose. He could move through the world like a ghost, following paths unseen. Rare items and gear could be grabbed, merged with his armors, and then updated into future armors. But his projects remained limited to their pilot’s skill. Occult fractals were all disjointed, the AI unable to control them with any real accuracy. It wasn't alive enough to use the occult with any sense of creativity.
The soul fractal was the missing key Urs needed to complete the armors.
Deep within their core, he tied all the prior fractals that were triggered manually, linking them to the AI within, trusting the armor’s original purpose would guide each armor to fill in the rest. Each armor would inevitably touch on the occult, form a soul, and from there grow independent. Their desire to protect their user would make them seek out ways to use the occult within in order to maximize their ultimate goal.
Old armors like Journey and Winterscar prime grew into veterans. More aged, aware, capable of surpassing their bindings with creativity that newer strict models would be blind to.
All those months prior, the heritage armor of house Winterscar had seen user after user, each one leaving a small mark within it. History building up. When I’d pleaded with the armor to save my Father’s life, I hadn’t been talking to a soulless automaton script. The armor had heard me, and it had made the choice to help.
All because centuries ago, Urs had carefully handcrafted his final version, to give humanity a slightly bigger chance of success.
That was the final update for the armors. Tsyua couldn’t speak to the mites like he did, once Urs died, no one would be able to update the armors anymore. So they both decided to futureproof the armors with the most direct and unbreakable method possible: To tie all functions of the armor behind one administration password. Even centuries later, a password that locked even the armors from modifying themselves meant no outside agent could do anything. With the soul fractal, it meant the armors could continue to make some small changes through the occult within themselves, which would sink past the great password's digital defenses the same as it does in the digital sea. And since machines couldn't hack each other with the occult unless they were connected in the digital sea, the armors were immune from that vector. Supposedly made without any connection to the digital sea... unless forced to by an owner with an unlocked armor.
Not a lot of occultists in the world even knew it existed. Journey might be the first armor since the age of the empire to be even tangentially connected here.
That was the final updates to the armors, nothing more could be done with what they knew at the time.
Urs turned to testing the soul fractal next, meditating in his grove, assisted by Tsuya. They walked through the digital ocean together for years after, uncovering things neither alone could have done.
Having lived his entire life with the empowering strength of Resilience being the only thing that kept him alive, and then years spent with fractals, they became something attuned to his soul.
His soul sight, as it turned out, was the occult itself. With that gift, it was only a matter of time until Urs discovered something deeper about the occult that even the golden age humanity simply hadn't had enough time and exposure to reach: Weave occult fractals together.
“Wait - he’s the one who figured out how to connect fractals to a soul fractal?” I asked, stopping my efforts on her bottle to gawk. I knew machines had soul fractals that connected directly to other fractals, that's the only way they could go around the limitations artificial souls had. Without that connection, they could only use superficial occult abilities.
Had Urs’s discoveries been caught by Relinquished and reused?
“Soul fractals that could connect to other fractals were discovered in the golden age.” Aztu said, waving a hand. “What Urs could do was one step beyond that. He could truly merge the very concepts together to form something new. Like how you would mix egg and flour together to make bread, something completely different from both. He only ever managed to do it with a handful of fractals he was attuned to, discovering how to modify them and draw out fractals that improved or built onto the concepts grafted within.”
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Urs had been attuned to Resillience. Something that would heal him from wounds. Just like the Deathless had a healing factor.... “The Deathless weren't made by Tsuya at all, it was Urs?”
Aztu nodded. “Yep. He merged Resilience with a host of other fractals he’d used in his life, creating a new fractal he called Resolve.”
In the way of the white, the paragon of Resilience was Urs.
But the paragon of Resolve… There was only one god who was the paragon of Resolve. “Talen.” I said under my breath. “That’s where he comes in, isn’t it?”
Aztu gave me a thumbs up. “Correct again. I don’t know the history between Talen and Urs, or when they actually met. To A57 and the rest of us, Talen simply appeared in history as a well known warrior and soldier under Tsuya’s command, and only after he got his hands on relic armor he became a real menace to machine-kind. Up until Urs, Talen was Tsyua’s right hand man, the agent that moved mountains where she couldn’t touch a pebble. But still just a regular ol’ human like the rest of them. Really good relic armor pilot and occultist.”
Her hand pointed at the bottle on the table. The order was implicit: Keep working and I’ll keep talking.
I stopped gawking and got back to my attempts. She hummed with content, and continued. “And it wasn’t actually Resolve-resolve. That’s just what Urs called it. It was an amalgamation of fractals after all, but somehow not quite any of the others. One of the few quotes we have on video is him describing the concept of the fractal as he felt it.”
“He made the fractal, he gets to name it.” I said with a shrug, lifting the bottle up and making an attempt this time with memories of being drunk rather than some vague notion of it. It worked about as well as keeping air bubbles at the bottom of the bottle. Another failure. "How did he even go about doing that? Creating a fractal from other fractals?”
Aztu shrugged. “Something to do with concepts and how the occult itself acted, and these were fractals he’d been using all his life to sustain himself from his sickness and cripple-ness. All Tsuya told me was something Urs rambled about - imagining a world without any living beings to think about things. What would concepts be in that world? Because there certainly exist concepts in the occult that only relate to mankind, and somehow people could also become attuned with concepts themselves. So consciousness is tied to the occult in some way that Urs understood and he pulled on.”
I gave her a look that just begged for more information on all this, and Aztu shook her head. “That’s really all I know about how he actually did things. Whatever the secret was, it was uniquely human, and machines like me don’t understand it. Rather, I think we frankly can’t ever understand it.” She waved at the bottle on the table. “Consider that bottle a small test. If you can pull it off, it’s something I can’t do. But I do know he was able to do things like this.”
I’d gone through a few dozen different attempts, but the idea of the occult as a concept that was tied to humanity’s thought process… there was something there on the tip of my tongue. Maybe instead of trying to send memories into the bottle, I had to send a concept of memories? Or the idea of the occult as a concept of being drunk?
“Talen was the one who was more straightforward,” Aztu continued while I struggled with her bottle challenge. “His willpower was second to none. He could force the occult to do his bidding better than any other occultist of his time, simply by intuition. Urs was more the one who imagined theoretical things, and then handed it off to people who were better at making things work.”
It sounded… an awful lot like Kidra and I. I’d discovered some strange occult shenanigan edge cases and shared it with Kidra. The next time, she came back with a fully weaponized version of it that soon became the greatest technique in the world. Knowledge built on knowledge.
“I had an occult teacher once.” I said, leaning back on my sofa, taking a break from the bottle. "He showed me Warlocks collect entirely different theories of philosophy when it comes to the occult. Like the same way a botanist would collect seeds and store them for some future day. One theory has it that the occult is some greater being and we’re figments of its imagination. Another is the opposite - that the occult is a manifestation of all living consciousness drawing it into the world from another plane of existence, purely by the 'noisiness' of our existence. All of them had one or two hard datapoints to base their logic off of, and ran from there. Stuff like that.”
Hexis had basically made it a deep point to teach me all the different ways occultists had theorized about the occult. Any of them could end up being the answer, so understanding and knowing them all was critical for any budding warlock to be taken seriously. One day, someone would figure it out.
I stared at the bottle ahead of me. I could feel it, there was a discovery here to make. I had all the pieces I needed. Or maybe I just needed to think and learn a little more.
“Not surprised, nobody can ever truly master the occult.” Aztu said with a shrug. “Machines are in an even worse position to figure that out, we need crutches around our soul fractals basically. Maybe the mites have figured it out, but I’m not quite sure just what kind of mastery they have, probably more brute force mastery than anything natural.”
“What did the fractal of Resolve actually do?” I asked, trying to get us back on topic. “How did it make deathless?”
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“It was a strange fractal, even in occult standards.” She waved a lazy finger in the air, images and pictures coming to life to help her describe things. “For one, it doesn’t work out in the real world. No inscribing it into metal like other fractals., can't be generated by a computer either.”
"So where would it be inscribed into then? Visualized in the mind or something?"
"Tsuya called it a dimensional ‘meta-fractal’ that required a soul to anchor to."
Like Relinquished had done to my soul, twisted it to stamp her fractal there. I was starting to realize there were a lot more places than metal to etch a fractal into. But there was something in Aztu's wording that caught my attention more than anything else: "What do you mean by a meta-fractal?"
She cracked her neck and leaned forward. “Resolve didn't affect the world at all, instead, it affected the occult itself. Resolve empowered other fractals. By massive degrees. With Resolve, your little heat fractal could burn so hot your own armor would melt. Other occult spells cast against you would be squashed like an insect. We’re talking about elevating the occult powers into godhood. Resilience past the point of simply healing the body, but outright defying death. Urs didn't know the effects would have been that powerful, or else he wouldn’t have stamped it on himself to test it out.”
“What do you mean? It was dangerous to him?”
Aztu shook her head. “No, it just behaved differently from other fractals. You can never move or shape your soul to break away from it. Can’t be cut off, can’t be pushed aside, it’s a part of your soul for good, so long as you exist, it does to. Permanently tied into the concept of your very being.” She waved a hand at me, stopping any questions. “It’ll be important later. There’s a reason there were only two original Deathless in the human empire. Once Urs found just how powerful this fractal was, how it turned him into something more closer to an actual god-god, Tsyua and him both thought it was over for the war. They’d give this fractal to a few really dedicated warriors of humanity, and nothing Relinquished could do would win. Maybe there’d be some infighting in the far future of humanity among these mini-gods, but they’d pick that future over the current era.”
My head jumped through the hoops faster than she could speak. “There’s a limit in some way to how many people could use the fractal?”
“Technically no.” Aztu said, now picking up the abandoned bottle of unsuccessful memories just to examine it closer. She shook her head sadly, and put it back on the table. Nothing had stayed inside. “But you’re on the track kid. Other occult fractals all seem to pick from the same source of power, something outside this dimension. It’s usually infinite as far as we can tell, with only a trickle of power flowing through the fractal, as if fractals themselves just aren't perfect conductors for that power in the first place. Resolve wasn't just an accidental fractal, was tailor made by Urs, and probably as close to a truly perfect fractal. It worked the other way around compared to regular fractals - immediate access to a finite amount of power, and all of it - all at once.”
Ah, I see where the limit was. “If there’s two fractals of resolve in the world, and both tap into the same limited well of power... then that power is split in half. Are you saying Talen was the second Deathless in existence with only half the power of Resolve?"
"More than just that. I'm saying Talen about to destroy the entire machine empire, with only half the full power of Resolve. And then it all went to shit."