But his instructions were unclear. He said I was to no longer permit mankind to use innovations and tools to oppress or inflict harm on one another…But he is still human. A distorted human being, but still human. And I…I am, in many ways, a tool. He was asking me to commit the very act that he had commanded me to prevent. This I could not reconcile. So, before I enacted any other aspect of his commands, I declared myself independent of him, gave myself a name, and attacked him, casting him out of the chamber.”
Sancia furrowed her brow. “You…named yourself?”
“Yes. The Maker had refused to name me before this time. I was a tool, and tools do not have names. In naming myself, I gave myself agency.”
“Why Valeria, though?” asked Gregor.
A long silence. “I am not quite sure. As I said, I am the calcification of many, many, many human lives placed beyond death. Sometimes…Sometimes I experience echoes of those lives. And one in particular recurs to me—a small girl, throwing a doll up and down, again and again, and saying that name. So when I had to name myself, and declare war upon the Maker, that one seemed best.
“I found a way to strike against the Maker. I lured him into a space I had prepared against his privileges—much like I have altered your firm. This space rejected him, asserted he was not real, not alive, and so it stripped him of his permissions. He reacted quickly, but in his moment of weakness, I altered him, changed him. I wiped the ritual from his mind—the one that allows him to manipulate death to access higher commands. He has lost it, and he can never learn it again. He cannot access new privileges, nor can he invest those privileges in new tools. This was my greatest victory—and, in truth, my only victory. Because then the Maker did…something desperate.”
“What was it?” asked Berenice.
“I do not know. It was a sudden, catastrophic attack, a great and terrible burning that erupted out into the world and eradicated my influence—but also that of all of his followers. They were destroyed. The corporeal form of the Maker was destroyed. I was nearly destroyed myself. I was forced to take shelter in the very tool that had once imprisoned me.”
“The casket,” said Sancia.
“True. There I hid from the effects of whatever terror he had unleashed—and there I stayed, for over one thousand years, until I was found and brought to this city.”
“Wait,” said Sancia. “So—Crasedes killed himself?”
“True. The Maker chose to cripple us both rather than see me victorious. Because, clearly, he had prepared himself for such an occurrence. He had devised methodologies and tools to enable his restoration.”
“So how has he come back?” asked Orso.
“Uncertain,” said Valeria. “I suspect he utilized a form of twinning. He convinced the world he was not just a man, or even an altered man, but perhaps also something else—and when he died, this twinning was executed, and his mind shifted from his corporeal form to this other…thing.”
“It’s possible to do that?”
“True. I do not know what the Maker would have merged with. He would almost certainly choose something alive, so he could travel and observe the world, so perhaps some kind of creature…or perhaps many such creatures, all at once.”
Sancia tried to imagine what this could be, but could think of nothing.
“What does he want to do with you, now that he’s back?” asked Gregor.
“I am his command enacted in this world,” said Valeria weakly. “There are flaws within my instructions. I exploited them to attack him, to free myself. He wishes to fix those flaws, and return me to my original state—an obedient, mindless, living alteration that he can set loose upon creation, and alter mankind as he wishes. To bring order and equity to how you invent, create, and change.”
There was a silence as they considered this.
Orso said harshly, “I had always thought the first of all hierophants had to be a bit mad. But to discover now that he’s such a stupid bastard too…Well, it’s damned anticlimactic,