Zahaka placed a slender, clawed finger to her lip in thought. "A prison, yes, though I should say the word is a little harsh."
"No," said Chi-You. "It is what it is: an inescapable prison. No matter how much you clean and beautify this prison, it will still be a cell."
"How long have you all been here?" said Li.
"Around a thousand years, perhaps?" said. Chi-You.
Zahaka raised a correcting finger. "One thousand and eighty six years, to be exact."
Li fished out memories of his conversation with Count Alarie about the origins of this world. "Let's see, didn't you all arrive to the new world around a thousand years ago? You mean to say almost right after arriving, you came here?"
"Came here? That makes it sound as if we had a choice in the matter." Zahaka flitted out a forked tongue and sighed. "I will break it down for you. One thousand and ten years ago, we, the gods, and also the demons and beasts, arrived upon this strange new world. Do you recall the history of the old world? Of what our purpose was there?"
"I do." Li nodded. "Where certain spirits can be guardians of homes or forests or waters, you, the original gods, were guardians of the entire world. You were the planet's defense system, rising up when the demons threatened the world. You nourished life by guiding civilizations to grow, and then you ascended into Valhul, waiting to descend once more then the world came under threat."
In the case of Elden World, the gods never moved from Valhul. Players could interact with them through a fast-travel system and challenge them to fights in Valhul in the endgame, but there was no such travel system in Eldenia. In fact, the only times the gods ever came down during the storyline was for final boss fights where the fate of the world lay in danger.
"Correct. Your knowledge is sharp. I fear you may take my place as god of insight." Zahaka smiled for a faint second before reassuming a serious air. "It seems that this new world has bound us as its guardians as well. When we first arrived, we saw that there were mortal civilizations.
Puny, primitive little things, and they would all fall to the might of demons. Thus, we did as guardians would, and fought off the demons and uplifted the civilizations, leading them out from their tribes and into great castles and kingdoms."
"Those were the times," said Chi-You as he cracked his knuckles, reminiscing of days gone by. "Endless battle and then afterwards, endless teaching mortals – my two favorite activities."
Zahak nodded. "We did far more than teach, we etched the very concept of magic within the mortals, granting them the power to fulfill all their wishes. Alas, it is a cruel irony that our wishes are never heeded, for when life had been sufficiently nurtured and the demons – the threat to the world at the time – were dealt with, we were forced to ascend to Valhul, swept aside and locked in like old tools that one never has a use for again."
"Surely, there would have been some world-ending threat that would have called you back over the course of a thousand years," said Li.
"Oh, that is what we thought too." Zahaka shrugged. "Mortals and their fickle minds given the might of magic, and the demons sealed but still present: we thought that the perfect cauldron to brew a disaster. Perhaps in a century, perhaps in two, maybe three, possibly four or five. We were awfully cheery for those few hundred years too, ever hopeful that we would be called back oncemore."
She shook her head. "Yet that has not been the case." She pointed to the basin at the center of the throne room. "Through the well of souls, we may glimpse what occurs on the mortal plane. The demons rose, but they were crushed each time, and, in a cruel twist of fate, their invasions unified the mortals such that they did not fight among other, eliminating chances of devastating mortal infighting."
Li came up to the well of souls, glimpsing the pool of moonlit water. "According to lore, the well is also supposed to contain the souls of all the dead mortals, the noble and the damned alike. That implies it's some sort of passageway from here to the mortal plane."
"The well was the first thing I investigated in my attempts to escape this accursed realm," said Zahaka.
"But though some aspects of us, such as the duty which binds us to this realm unless the world needs us, remain the same as in the old world, others have altered. Where we once used to judge the souls of the dead through the well, we hold no such power now.
As it stands, the well is merely a looking glass to the other side. It is not by any means a passageway by which spiritual bodies may pass from mortal to divine or divine to mortal planes. It is merely a reflection."
"There must be something to get you all out of here," said Li as he turned impatiently back to Zahaka. "I can't stay here forever. I have a farm to tend to."
"A farm? That is what drives you?" Zahaka raised a brow and shrugged. "I should not judge. Anything would be better than staying here forever." She slithered towards Li and stopped in front of him, inspecting him. When she stood on outstretched coils, she was quite large, standing sizably taller than Li. "Hmm, though we are destined to an eternity here, I believe you have a chance to escape. You would simply have to use Noctus's method."
Chi-You jerked his head up in surprise. "Are you certain, Zahaka?"
Li tapped his staff to the ground to command some attention. "Noctus's method? So one of you has already escaped."
Zahaka slithered away from Li, turning her back and crossing her arms. Her posture became still in thought. "Oh, he has escaped, but I should not call him one of us anymore."
She sighed, the snakes in her hair hissing before she turned back to Li with a wistful smile. "I have spent hundreds of years studying the nature of reality, of the fabric of space and the flow of time, in an attempt tear open a passageway back to the mortal plane.
The results of my experiments have been varied. For one, I have determined that Valhul is its own enclosed dimension, and it is a small one, small enough that I have managed to knit several separate realms atop it, much like the layers of an onion."
"And thank goodness for that, I would have missed my Arena far too much otherwise," said Chi-You.
Zahaka continued. "As you can see, these realms have been converted into homes for each of us gods, but that was not my original intention. Attempting to tear open a passageway in Valhul was impossible with magic, so I experimented and tried to create a new realm where the rules were more flexible.
However, so long as the realms I forged were anchored to Valhul as its base – and they had to be, for I had no other space to work with – I could not open such passageways."
She closed her eyes. "But Noctus, how many years ago was it again? Ah, it is the only memory I wish to forget. About four hundred years ago, Noctus proposed a highly interesting solution. If our godly magic was insufficient as it was bound to servicing the planet, then what about something more?
Something…otherworldly? Something alien? Something beyond the scope of the world?"
Li nodded, following along. He knew now that the gods, though they had been transported from the game and acted and thought like individuals, were still bound by their lore-related duties.
They were weighed down by their programming to only ever appear when the world needed them and to leave once their role was finished. In that sense, he also understood that the world itself had some degree of a personified will as it did in the game, though to what extent, he had little clue.
When he thought about it, he realized the demons were bound to their lore to a degree as well. Their urge to fight among each other to elect a leader to take over the world - that was what they had always done in the game, and now, over the centuries, it had become a sacred tradition.
But there was one class of entity in the game that was explicitly mentioned to be alien entities, and those were Old Ones, of which Noctus had the potential to become.
"You're saying," said Li as he watched Zahaka's careful pale eyes. "Noctus decided to become an Old One to try and break the rules. If he turns into an alien that's meant to threaten the world, then he's no longer bound to protect it. In fact, his threat to the world alone would bring all of you out."
"Most certainly, and an astoundingly innovative idea at that, but suboptimal, for it would mean we would have to fight against him," said Zahaka, a hint of admiration leeching into her normally cold voice. "I conducted many experiments with him and derived the conclusion that he did not even have to fully become an Old One and lose his sense of self.
Eldritch energy, I have observed, is highly volatile and interactive with the fundamental fabric of reality. With enough of it, it would be possible to rip open a passageway to the mortal realm.
However, Noctus did not wish to become a maddened, hostile force to us, and we did not wish to see him fall to that fate either. Yet to open that passageway would require enough energy to fully turn him from divinity to eldritch…thing.
But I still managed. This reality binds us here, resetting us to perfect condition when we suffer damage to expire, and so I repurposed that little element and incorporated it within a ritual wherein Noctus could shunt as much eldritch force as he wished and still be able to reverse all the damage to his divinity. The ritual would also act as a refined targeting method, configuring the eldritch energies to precisely open a portal to the mortal plane and not some forsaken wasteland in another world."
Li saw Chi-You grow still and bow his head. Zahaka flitted her eyes downwards. "But something went wrong," he said.
"I did warn both Noctus and his brother that the ritual was not yet stable, but Helius, ever the optimist, believed nothing could possibly go wrong. He convinced all of us that our freedom was near with a resounding speech, and I must admit, though I am a researcher first and foremost, the tempting vision of freedom dulled my wary analysis."
Zahaka wrung her hands together as if to rid herself of the memory.
"The ritual did not work. It did not do anything right. It did not adequately control Noctus's eldritch energy, and he succumbed to madness. His madness disrupted the ritual further, causing the rift he opened to close upon but himself."
Li shook his head. He knew that when Noctus became an Old One, he did not become a balanced being like Li, focusing on both raising and destroying life. No, the god became purely a vessel for destruction, a signal beacon which called upon all the dark forces of the universe to descend upon the world for its consumption. That was why there were so many lovecraftian bonus bosses in the game - they had all been directed by Noctus as a herald.
Yet if that had been the case –
"I know how strong Eldenia is. Noctus as an Old One would annihilate the entire world without an issue, forcing you to leave this prison," said Li. "But the world is still standing, and all of you are still here."
"Noctus, though a god of night and death, was still a guardian of mortals, for without life, there is no death, and though vastly different from his brother, they still shared an overwhelming sense of duty. With the last few shreds of sanity he had left, he sealed himself in a deep slumber at the deepest recesses of the world, never to threaten the mortals for whose sake he had fought for so long ago."
"But that also meant there wasn't a threat anymore to call the rest of you down," said Li.
"Correct, and there are many days that I wonder that it would have been better for Noctus to have turned fully into an abomination for us to kill."
"Stop," said Chi-You. "You cannot mean that."
"I do." Zahaka's jaw set. "He has no hope of ever returning to his old self, and yet he cannot die, bound to an eternal slumber. We could have put him out of his misery. Helius now is a wreck of a god, a shell of a divinity, swallowed up by oceans of grief and guilt, unable to even shine a sun even in this small little realm. But had he gotten proper closure by slaying his brother, I am sure he would still be somewhat radiant."
She paused, and when she spoke again, there was the faintest tremble underlining her voice. "But in the end, it is my foolish errors that have caused such disaster, yet I see now a chance to make what has been wronged right."
"You do? You know a way out?" said Li.
Zahaka nodded. "If you are willing to be a subject to my experiment, then yes."