The Truth: Beleth

Beleth, if you are reading this, then I am surely gone, and you have of course come rifling through my things in a search for answers. Answers that you have already concluded you are unlikely to find elsewhere. I’ve no way of knowing if you found this through rage or confusion, happiness or pain, but I will commit to this document everything you need know of the circumstances of your birth. It may be quite taxing to seriously commit yourself to reading the entirety of the information here, but as your father, I encourage you to at least persevere through it. After all, it is the truth about your existence.

The most initial thing to get out of the way is that you do not simply have a mother and a father like traditional children. By now, you likely have already been made aware of the fact that despite my best efforts, you actually have two mothers, not simply one, and they have each influenced your development greatly. But I have gotten ahead of myself—once more, from the beginning.

Initially, you were a failed project. I ad been tasked through my work to both observe and foster good relations with as many tribes of the so called beastmen as possible, and when possible to observe the summoning rituals of the less passive tribes among them. From this humble and quite frankly boring series of missions, I formed a theory: If primals are effectively gods, and ones formed from the faith and belief of those who summon them, what then becomes of a being formed without faith, and more importantly what if such a being was formed without anyone to observe it? Would it persist? Could such a being be considered a true god? Seeking these answers, I acquired the help of your first mother. Her name was Ixion. You have met her several times by now I am certain, and I’m even more certain you have already managed to figure this much out. Either way, we took our aether, and more or less siphoned our essence which happened to be compatible from ourselves before combining them. Rather than form you into a temporary state with crystals and perpetuate a meaningless cycle, I used my grimoire to act as a temporary vessel and Ixion with her admittedly impressive magicks, opened a realm separate enough from our own to serve as an environment free of observation. Ultimately, this experiment failed.

The failure was largely my fault; I failed to take into account the fact that my grimoire which was connected to me was effectively a form of observation itself, and with what could be considered pieces of our souls composing of your entire being, naturally you had some form of “taint” from each of us. At some point without either of us really noticing, you formed a consciousness and personality that seemed to be a mixed caricature of our own. You were as a warped mirror, but you were very clearly still separate from us. Noticing this, I abandoned the project, and constructed vessels that Ixion and I could monitor. My new goal was instead to see if I could truly create a sustainable lifeform through arguably extremely unstable means such as this. The answer very soon proved to be yes. You gained your own personality, and through some method as of yet unknown to me, you were able to access my memories—and therefore learn. Grow. You were now at least metaphorically alive, just wholly segregated from everyone else. I am not completely blind to the moral implications of what I had done of course; I realized that I had created a life doomed to effectively only experience the world through me and considered that a terrible fate. With Ixion, we planned to use her body as the incubator—you were already a soul after all, you only needed flesh to persist in this world—but….things did not go to plan. Without going into unnecessary detail, Ixion at this point opted to betray the cause, and pursued other things in her life. Seeing it as a betrayal, I severed your contact with her, and planned to bring you into this world without her assistance.

After several failed attempts at creating a false body for you, I realized that the issue was simply that your soul was growing at a rate too exponential for normal flesh to possibly contain you, and artificial flesh would fare no better as it lacked the ability to grow along with you. It would be naught more than a temporary solution. That is around the time that I remembered the original thing I used to maintain your essence. My grimoire was yet another sentient thing I created, and while not nearly as powerful as you, that was more due to my own inability than the grimoire itself. A tool that can grow and self-replicate were seemingly the best possible solutions at hand for creating you. If I could not directly create your flesh, then what was needed was a vessel that could at the very least simulate flesh for you as you see fit. And to manipulate such a vessel, of course you would need a steady supply of aether as well. It seemed the obvious solution was my original intention when I created you: I would birth you as a god.

The immediate issue however was that I refused to create you as some misguided summon beholden to the will of your creators. I would make you better and stronger, and more able to utilize the tools that were in place to make you. And so, I did what I do best of course which is sow the seeds of chaos and despair. It was all very well thought out and carefully planned of course, but the intricate details of this campaign are largely irrelevant to the end result. Within this timeframe of course, was when I was reunited with your birth mother Onini. Through various circumstances, we managed to encounter each other at several points in our lives, and there was always some sort of thing that drew us to one another. I will admit that it was largely on impulse that I brought her into my undertaking. I was still angry about Ixion, and I likely wanted some measure of control over someone I thought was faking their interest in me. Plainly, I was ready to destroy her the moment she moved to betray me—but this was turned around when our careful spite about one another turned into something genuine. It is baffling to me still how strongly and suddenly this seemed to occur, but at the very least I can assure you that it was real.

By this point, I had already seduced others with vessels meant for you and sent them out into the world on various missions. As these vessels grew, so too did your attachment to this plan. These vessels were made out to be objects of faith—or to be more precise, YOU were considered an object of worship through several mediums—and in so doing your presence in this world grew. But even with this exponential growth, there was still no flesh to truly sustain you; you had no life through any of my methods thus far. It was at this point that Onini—your mother—expressed her desire to bring you into this world naturally (or at the very least, as naturally as was possible). The issue still present in this scenario was that your soul had grown too much for even her especially resilient body to survive. I was not ready to sacrifice her I admit, but luckily I found an alternative: A researcher that wanted desperately to understand my peculiar aether.

Raziel was her name, and it is she whom you are constantly connected to the other side through, and your alias on this side. Unbeknownst to her, she solved a small riddle I’d been trying to understand for years. Apparently, at some point I had a seal placed on my body to prevent me from casting magic. But it had to have been done when I was quite young. What I could not figure out was why such an intricate and obviously well thought out seal would fail to take something like my growth into account? Through the years, I seem to get more and more of the ability that was taken from me back, and I could not explain why. All signs pointed to the seal working perfectly. That was when I finally realized that the reason was not because the seal was not working, but because an unforeseen element had interfered with the function of the seal. In summary, it was corruption. Finally, after years of wondering and worrying over my origin, the unintentional observations of one researcher gave me the answer I craved: Somehow, I a not from this star. Failing that, I am at least from another plane altogether, not unlike you. Take a moment to drink in that irony, as I found it quite humorous myself. Either way, after some negotiation, we came to the understanding that I would simply give her the free reign to do the research she wished to do. All she needed to do was sacrifice her flesh for the sake of my goals in return. Luckily, she did not require any persuasion, she simply wished to continue her research as soon as possible.

With all of the pieces in place, I launched my grand scheme. Onini had been nurturing your soul in her very flesh—and in so doing helped acclimate you both to the concept of have flesh and a foreign body—and Raziel willingly allowed herself to be consumed by the staff (another of your vessels) in order to substitute as your flesh. As I am sure you recall, when the prayers of the faithful reached you, you were able to not only gorge yourself on the strength of your empowered vessels, but on the aether of the faithful ardently wishing for your coming to bring about a new world. And whether or not they realized it, you did. At that moment, you segregated yourself from myself and Ixion entirely, and pulled everyone into a new realm built upon the prayers of the faithful and your own rampant strength. I created a special suit of armor that I lied and told the others was to be a vessel for you as well—but this was not the case. My armor was to prevent my consciousness from being entirely pulled over into this metaphorical realm that had just been born. I needed to stay here, in this world to facilitate your actual birth. Without getting into the horrid details, I served as something of a bridge. I maintained a link with everyone but you to keep their consciousness from being trapped on the other side, and busily converted Raziel’s abandoned flesh into a new vessel while Raziel attempted to snatch control of the newly summoned flesh from you. Per my instruction, you fought your mother (whom had also become a temporary vessel) and the two wielding the twin vessels. Without realizing it, each time they struck you in that place, they were bringing themselves and you closer to this plane and bringing Raziel’s consciousness closer to gaining control of the new body. I need not inform you how that encounter turned out—you are here after all.

This all leads me to the most important bit. I am not a fool of course, I know the dangers of a summoned being well enough, and I am at the very least intelligent enough to take an educated guess what would happen should a child of all things suddenly have access to all of that power and influence. So I used the seal on my body as a reference, and segregated pieces of you into each of your vessels before using my own seal as something of a lock. Trying to bind your soul on top of serving as a temporary bridge for all of those lost souls was more than enough to damage my…well, everything well beyond their limits. It also ironically bound your ability in several ways. You cannot obtain your true strength unless you become one with ALL of your vessels. Just to name a few, this includes the twin daggers—one of which is bound to a living person, meaning you would need to kill them, and the other pair I have hidden from you in a place that would be….difficult for you to find without learning more about my earlier adventures—there is also the staff of Raziel that would require you to subsume the actual Raziel whom is in an entirely different plane and learning to use your abilities far better than you likely have ever had a chance to. There is also Castle, whom also serves as the living vessel to control the sanctuary, which would mean you need to more or less consume an entire island. Beyond that, there are three more relics I have hidden just in case. If you came here for information on those, all I can say is good luck. I’m good at hiding things.

What you truly need to understand more than anything is the miracle of your existence. No, this is not meant to be something sentimental like the circumstances of your birth, but rather the gift I have hidden within the many locks I have placed on you. As I told you once, I am your jailer. But that was not said out of malice, but my own form of safeguarding your continued existence. I want you to think about the concept of infinity. Nothing and everything. What most people do not realize is that infinity can exist in two different configurations: Countable infinity, and uncountable infinity.

As of the writing of this document, you have no formal education in such things, so assuming the worst and that you have not learned aught from me, I will attempt to give you an easily understood version of each. For countable infinity, let us say think of the distance between numbers. Normally, most people think of numbers from zero, to one, to two, to three, and so on. But what most people do not realize is that the distance between zero and one are actually infinite. For example, the spaces inbetween numbers are also represented by numbers, but the distance is so vast that normally people cannot actually even imagine them. This is an example of something that is countably infinite—there is indeed a limit, but the limit is so far beyond normalized understanding that it is functionally the same as the concept of infinity for us. Then there is uncountable infinity, which would be like the amount of possibilities variable to any given thing at every given moment forever. There MIGHT be a limit somewhere, but conceptually it is infinite because it is impossible to actually define with any real numbers.

Around now you might be wondering why this is important. So let us review the circumstances of your birth. You were created from the shards of at least three souls, grew into your own independent being in another realm, and then through several mediums were brought into this realm. There was the prayers of the faithful, the many vessels which hold and nurtured your aether, my acting as a bridge to draw and drag you over, your mother giving birth to your flesh, and even Rzziel functioning as something of a substitute for you in another realm. Then there is the added feature of the supposed corruption in my aether that makes my own aether—and by extension your own—different from that of others. “You” were created through several different mediums but all of them are effectively you, and all of them are capable of being both independent of and dependent on you. IF you think about it calmly and carefully, you might come to the conclusion that your existence is countably infinite. However, if you truly dive into the concepts I have introduced here (I know you are intelligent enough to understand them) then you will realize how much more that that you are. If you truly come to an understanding of the extent of what I have done, then you will surely realize the critical weakness of this entire concept, which I will not be listing here on the off chance it is not actually you that is reading this document, but an enemy seeking to end you.

I would say ask me directly if you wish to know more…but the only way you would ever be reading this is if I was long dead. So instead allow me to express some degree of sentimentality. I did not do what I did out of some grand disgust at what ended up becoming you, nor did I truly consider you a failure by the time I enacted my plan to bring you into this world. The truth is that despite my less than eloquent attempts at showing it, I grew to love you, and wished for you to be free of any shackles that would have surely formed from too much contact with my…habits. I apologize if I somehow ruined your quality of life in one way or another, I simply wished for you to have the freedom to live as you wish, and to have the strength to do so without needing anyone else. No matter what you decide to do or what you ultimately do become, know that I love you.

Your Father,

Eligor

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