-x-

  Chapter 1

  -x-

  American Continent, ???

  -x-

  As an heir to a second generation magus family of no repute, she was all too aware of how cheap her life was to the magi of the clock-tower. Well, magi treated all lives not their own rather callously in general to be honest, but in this case she did not even have the shield that was reputation and tradition to stay their hand if she was ever caught off guard in a moment of vulnerability.

  As such, it was quite understandable why she woke up with such visceral panic the moment she realized that she could no longer detect the wards that kept her home somewhat safe from the cruel, vicious moonlit world of the supernatural.

  Realizing that she was unharmed, if quite changed, had her trying to recollect whatever she could from her foggy memory.

  Her name... was Ark Tiamat- what? No! That wasn't her name!

  Only… it was, wasn't it? Whoever she was before had died, and her origin; the root of her very existence and identity, had been overwritten when she had been incarnated into this body. And while she could remember most of her memories and still had some lingering impressions of her former self, in this new existence she is and always will be the Ark known as Tiamat.

  Considering the nature of one's mystical 'origin' and its influence on a person's sense of self… yeah that made sense. What didn't make sense was how she of all souls was selected for this purpose. She tried to prod the nascent divided world spirit that was her soul for answers and it stirred. Normally, prodding one's own soul for answers was a futile endeavor, but there was a peculiar branch of magecraft that allowed one to recover memories from past lives and reincarnations, which might come in handy considering her current situation. Usually, this gave rather random and mostly useless results, but in her case, her soul being an offshoot of the planet's should carry some lingering residual memories or ideas of what was going on just prior to her creation, Tiamat reasoned.

  [ ]

  What she understood from the incomprehensible, alien, memories of the planet was… that she was the most compatible soul it had found that was conveniently in range of the current era.

  That…didn't make sense? How was she the soul most compatible with the primordial mother TIAMAT, much less in the modern era?

  Wait. She called upon her [Authority], the divine power to actualize a result or effect without any discernible cause. Tiamat's authority was the [Chaos Tide], the primordial sea that birthed all life, and with it, she summoned a tiny puddle of said sea at her feet.

  Tiamat stared at the thick, black liquid that swirled in unsettling patterns with an expression of utter disbelief. And then she facepalmed. Hard.

  "Of course it was the fucking grail mud. It couldn't just stop at killing me, could it? I should have known."

  She was a second generation magus, born from parents who were newly initiated into the ways of magi. She was eight years old when her parents were called in to clean up the absolute clusterfuck that was the great Fuyuki fire, the aftermath of the fourth holy grail war, in order to preserve the secrecy of magecraft. Her parents managed to return, if barely. They were mere husks of themselves by then, traumatized as all hell and blighted with so many, many incurable curses they barely had time to give her a vial of the spilled grail's contents before they perished.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  'To be a magus was to walk with death.' It was only at that moment, that she truly understood what the saying meant. Though... Tiamat would rather had had her parents instead of whatever twisted legacy they wished to leave behind for her, in the end. If such was the price of enlightenment, she would have rather remained ignorant. But there was no turning back time, and she ended up working with what she had.

  Tiamat had spent the rest of her life researching the grail mud; it became an obsession that had consumed her life. Her parents had died to acquire it after all, and it was only right that she honored their sacrifice and ensured that all of it was not in vain. In the end, all she had managed to do was purify the mud of all the curses, but even then the grail mud was inherently hostile to human life. From her understanding of it, whatever the grail mud actually was, it was an unending font of true ether like nothing she had ever seen. But it was also a vector of corruption that subsumed and overwrote the physical and spiritual makeup of anything and everything it came into contact with it into something far more… primal. Whatever had polluted the grail mud had hijacked it to curse things, and bring about the 'worst possible outcome' instead of just letting it remain a mere biohazard of the highest order.

  It was just another Tuesday for a holy grail war, apparently. Whatever the fuck was going on in Fuyuki, she wanted no part in it, she had decided right there and then.

  Willing the sea of life to recede back into herself, it put things into perspective. The crucial component in the holy grail that made it work - the contents that filled up its vessel from the imaginary number space - was Tiamat's sea of life. It explained how the holy grail managed to harvest so much energy; it was literally drawing on the recycled ether left over from the planet's genesis, and all it needed was something of 'sufficient mass' to replace its contents with enough mud of equivalent value. Hence why it required the saint-graphs from sacrificed heroic spirits. It was rather simple but ingenious trick in hindsight, but she didn't have the foggiest idea why the sea of life was just chilling out in the imaginary number space instead of in the reverse-side of the planet where all the other supernatural things had retreated to after the age of gods.

  She also had no idea how the Einzberns, the alchemists who had constructed the grail, figured out it was there either. Perhaps they might just have stumbled into it like all other first generation magi - it made sense. Most magecraft practiced today found their origins from moments of opportunity and accidental discovery and recreation of older practices, more often than not. It also explained how the Einzbern were so good at creating artificial life, homunculi, if the literal sea of life was the basis of their research. It also explained how they managed to punch a way into the [Root] in the first place, considering they literally had a way to print infinite mana on demand. There were few things one couldn't accomplish with access to sufficient mana, after all. Especially when the issue of efficiency and conversion was invalidated entirely and their sorcery trait, wishcraft, could essentially spawn whatever the hell they wanted if they threw enough mana at it.

  [ ]

  Hm. Other than that revelation, she was also able to glean a bit of the purpose of her creation. Not much that she didn't already know; She was the planet's last attempt at preserving something of itself - a legacy so as to speak. A living Ark designed to move past the end of the world, and then start again somewhere new. Tiamat blinked away the tears from her eyes, understanding all too well that everything she knew and loved had long since turned to dust and ash decades, if not centuries age. She then turned her attention to the inheritors of the world - to try and parse what had happened for things to reach this point, but winced when all she got was white noise and garbled nonsense.

  The planet had already been dying when she had been created, and it didn't have the luxury to impart her with anything not related to her intended purpose in its state. She also didn't dare to attempt reconnecting with a leyline for more details, lest she too was contaminated by the rot and corruption spreading through the long dead world. If there were any leylines remaining at all at this point.

  Tiamat sighed.

  "No point in staying here any longer then. Might as well touch grass and see what's become of the future."

  Tiamat slowly made her way through the tunnel system she had found herself in, her massively improved eyesight somehow providing vision even in the absolute darkness. She ended up having to dig through a few collapsed sections and even some seemingly dead ends that had empty spaces or flowing water on the other end, but she had been making progress, climbing higher and higher over the hours of effort. She did not have to fear cave-ins, as impossibly durable as she was and her lack of need to actually breathe, but the part of her that remembered nearly drowning in her own bathtub refused to accept it as fact.

  Suffice to say, by the time she clawed her way to the surface, Tiamat's claustrophobia now had newly acquired context to draw from to traumatize her further, though that soon led to her second but no less concerning discovery.

  There was no longer any grass to touch on the surface, and for good reason.

  -x-