Mind Communication/Interaction

Jace climbed the staircase and stood on the dais. Prickling sensations spidered over his skin. The dais was like a bell that rang so low it couldn’t be heard, only felt. Jace reached his senses inside the monolith, trying to understand the source of the power. He needed to know what he would be handing to the Selesnya, to Emmara.

Jace couldn’t see into the interior of the floating slab of rock, but he sensed patterns within it—thoughtlike patterns. Mana flowed throughout the stone. Jace projected his mind into the space inside the rock and sensed a presence, a consciousness. The monolith was inhabited somehow.

***

This man who somehow dwelled within the stone at the Forum of Azor had no eyes, as Jace perceived him. In place of eyes there were only empty holes in his face, and Jace had the sense that he could see through the empty eyeholes into the man’s hollow interior.

But the being had some kind of life to it. In Jace’s mind’s eye, he saw the man turn and regard him. Jace could sense intelligence of a kind coming from this being, so he reached out his mind to it.

“Pardon me,” Jace thought to the being.

“Greetings,” the being said. The voice felt soft, but with a feeling of force behind it. “I am the bailiff. I can provide information.”

“The bailiff?” Jace thought to it. “Are you Azor?”

“No. I am the executor of the bidding of Azor. I was created by him to enact his will.”

“You’re a magically-created intelligence. A homunculus.”

“I have not been furnished with the definition of that term. But you are correct that I am a being created by magic.”

“But you’re just a mind. You have no physical form. You’re bound here, to the Forum of Azor.”

The luminous being put his hands out in a symmetrical gesture, then folded them inside the sleeves of his robes. “I am exempt from physical form, yes. I am a being made of law. I am the regulations and specifications of the Assessment, and I am the mechanism by which it shall be conducted. And when I have made the Assessment, I shall be the one to deliver its verdict.”

***

Dragon's Maze: The Secretist Part 3, Chapter 3